Say goodbye to the irritating system of remembering dozens of usernames and passwords, at least at work. With $6.5 million in Series A funding announced Friday, that’s just one of things Santa Monica-based Bitium promises to provide with its SaaS management software.
Built out of the co-founder’s own frustrations when running previous companies, Bitium strives to be a “product-forward company,” said CEO Scott Kriz. The software provides a single place employees can go to log onto multiple apps and services. It’s compatible with up to 1,700 cloud-based apps so far. The funding from Polaris Partners will go towards enhancing the product and accelerating sales and marketing.
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Bitium's dashboard
Bitium solves a pain point for mid-market companies that are heavy SaaS adapters. Kriz said he found that a company could be running 40 different pieces of software throughout their organization, but no one was properly managing it, not even the IT department. His own experience showed that whenever a new employee was hired, he needed to add them to a long-list of applications. And even worse, when someone left, he had to figure out what that person had access to. Kriz said that even after employees left the firm, they often kept paying for services for that individual - a total waste of money. With no one managing software access in the company, the burden fell on the head of the company.
What started as a tedious frustration grew into a creative solution helping companies like OpenTable and Media Temple. Kriz said his easiest sell is for heavy SaaS adapters and companies that have between 100 and 2,000 employees. Bitium service starts with a basic inventory of all the different programs a company might be using; often, the total number vastly exceeds what any employee would have guessed.
The service is a single sign-on and provisioning system, so employees can access everything they need from one point and over multiple devices. Bitium also shows users how secure individual passwords are and provides security analytics to the company. As Bitium works with a client, they see the client learning about how their employees truly use different applications and do their work. With that new knowledge in hand, Kriz said they make smarter decisions, especially regarding security.
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Bitium's system to manage users
Beyond his own product, Kriz said he is excited about the move away from the “antiquated system” of having dozens of usernames and passwords to the emerging system that looks at different ways of authenticating identity. The shift will take a long time, but is a trend that Bitium is cashing in on. The company started selling their product just last year and is focused on product improvement and marketing.
Kriz said he thinks of the company as unique in the LA startup market because of its product and because of its culture (they provide monthly activities like yoga and surf lessons!). The company has 22 full-time employees and is actively hiring, with a lot of talent coming through their internship program. The new round of funding will help the company to “hire smart,” said Kriz.
