Cerbos
Cerbos provides an open-source authorization management platform that decouples policy decisions from application code, serving enterprise software, AI agent deployments, and regulated industries with RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, and PBAC enforcement.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2021
- HeadquartersLondon, United Kingdom
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Cerbos does
Cerbos, operated under the legal entity Zenauth Ltd (registered in England and Wales, registration number 13249733), is an enterprise authorization management platform founded in London in 2021 by Emre Baran (CEO), Charith Ellawala (CTO), and later joined by CPO Alex Olivier. The company's core technology is an open-source Policy Decision Point (PDP) that decouples authorization logic from application code, evaluating access requests against human-readable YAML policies that support RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, and PBAC models with sub-millisecond decision latency and the ability to scale to millions of decisions per second. The platform has evolved into a three-component suite: Cerbos PDP as the open-source decision engine (Apache 2.0 on GitHub with approximately 4.5k stars), Cerbos Hub as the cloud-based control plane for policy authoring, testing, versioning, distribution, and audit, and Cerbos Synapse as a data enrichment and orchestration layer that pulls identity and resource context from external systems.
Cerbos monetizes through a freemium open-source model for the PDP, with subscription SaaS revenue from Cerbos Hub and an enterprise tier that includes Cerbos Synapse plus managed services, custom SLAs, and dedicated support. The go-to-market combines product-led growth via self-serve open-source and a free Cerbos Cloud tier with enterprise field sales targeting CISOs, security teams, and engineering leadership at Fortune 500 and regulated-industry customers in fintech, healthcare, insurance, and government. Native SDKs across JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java, .NET, PHP, and Ruby, plus integrations with identity providers (Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Auth0, Keycloak), API gateways (Kong, Gravitee, Envoy), and data platforms (Trino, Neo4j) provide the developer-first distribution backbone. The company holds SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, HIPAA, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, PCI DSS, GDPR, and NIST 800-53/171 certifications and has raised approximately $11 million across a 2021 pre-seed led by Crane Venture Partners and an April 2023 seed led by OMERS Ventures.
Cerbos firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Cerbos
- Legal name
- Zenauth Ltd
- Website
- https://cerbos.dev
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2021
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- Cerbos provides an open-source authorization management platform that decouples policy decisions from application code, serving enterprise software, AI agent deployments, and regulated industries with RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, and PBAC enforcement.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Cerbos industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Authorization Management Software
- NAICS
- Computer Systems Design and Related Services (5415), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (51821), Custom Computer Programming Services (541511)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Business Rules & Decision Management Platforms (BRMS/DMN) (HDAEAKAG)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) & Decision Automation (HDAEAHAE), Cloud Compliance, Audit & Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM/GRC) (HDABAHAI), Regulatory Change Management (RCM) (HDADAIAG)
Keywords
Where Cerbos is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- London
- HQ country
- United Kingdom
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices2 records
Markets served
Cerbos business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure, Operations
Revenue model
- Cerbos PDP (Open Source): Free, open-source authorization engine available under Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. Provides core policy decision point functionality for developers and organizations to self-host.
- Cerbos Hub (Cloud Management): Cloud-hosted control plane for policy management, CI/CD integration, and centralized policy distribution. Subscription-based SaaS offering with tiered pricing for teams and enterprises.
- Cerbos Synapse: Data enrichment and orchestration layer for advanced identity/resource data integration. Part of enterprise tier with advanced data source connectors and enrichment capabilities.
- Enterprise Support & SLA: Dedicated enterprise support, custom SLAs, and professional services for organizations requiring guaranteed response times and hands-on implementation assistance.
Go-to-market motion3 records
Distribution channels4 records
Marketing channels8 records
Cerbos product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Cerbos provides an end-to-end enterprise authorization management platform built on an open-source Policy Decision Point (PDP). The platform consists of the open-source Cerbos PDP engine for evaluating access decisions, Cerbos Hub as a cloud control plane for authoring, testing, versioning and distributing policies, and Cerbos Synapse for data enrichment and orchestration. It enforces fine-grained authorization through YAML-based policies supporting RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC and PBAC models with sub-millisecond decision latency, sold to engineering, security and IAM teams for both traditional applications and AI agent workloads.
Product overview
Cerbos is an end-to-end enterprise authorization management platform consisting of multiple integrated components: the open-source Cerbos PDP (Policy Decision Point) as the core authorization engine, Cerbos Hub as the centralized policy administration control plane for policy authoring and management, Cerbos Synapse for data enrichment and orchestration, and Cerbos PEP SDKs for policy enforcement across multiple programming languages. The platform supports RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, and PBAC authorization models, enabling fine-grained, contextual, and continuous authorization across applications, APIs, AI agents, MCP servers, services, and workloads. Policies are defined in YAML and managed centrally, with real-time policy updates and sub-millisecond decision latency.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Cerbos Hub: Policy Administration Point - control plane for policy authoring, testing, versioning, distribution, and audit visibility
- Cerbos PDP
- Cerbos Synapse
- Cerbos PEP SDK
Products and services
- Cerbos PDP Open-source Policy Decision Point (PDP) that evaluates requests against policies and returns access decisions. Stateless, high-performance authorization engine that scales horizontally with sub-millisecond decision latency.
- Cerbos Hub Centralized control plane for policy authoring, testing, versioning, distribution, and audit visibility. Provides end-to-end policy lifecycle management with CI/CD integration, testing, and real-time distribution across PDP instances.
- Cerbos Synapse Enrichment and orchestration layer that fetches identity, resource, and relationship data from external systems to enrich authorization requests and translates infrastructure protocols into Cerbos policy checks.
- Cerbos Cloud Managed cloud deployment option for Cerbos PDP, providing hosted infrastructure for authorization decisions.
Quantifiable outcome
- 100x faster launch for new roles and permissions
- +3 more outcomes
Companies that use Cerbos
Customer profileNamed customers4 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles3 records
Cerbos technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration28 records
AI capability2 records
Feature10 records
Cerbos partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Six partnerships are on record, tiered core.
- OktacoreIntegration partnership with Okta for identity provider connectivity. Cerbos connects to Okta for seamless authentication context in authorization decisions.
- Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD)coreIntegration with Microsoft Entra ID for enterprise identity and authentication context integration.
- Auth0coreIntegration partnership with Auth0 for authentication context integration into Cerbos authorization decisions.
- KeycloakcoreIntegration with Keycloak open-source identity provider for enterprise authentication context.
- KubernetescoreNative Kubernetes deployment support for Cerbos PDP as a sidecar or service deployment with Helm charts and operator support.
- OpenID FoundationcoreCerbos CPO Alex Olivier co-chairs the OpenID AuthZEN working group, shaping authorization standards. Cerbos is committed to AuthZEN compliance.
Scale indicators5 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Cerbos competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Oso: Oso offers a developer-focused authorization library and service for embedding fine-grained permissions in applications, directly competing with Cerbos PDP/Hub across RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC use cases.
- Permit.io: Permit.io provides an authorization-as-a-service platform with policy management, audit, and ReBAC support — overlapping closely with Cerbos Hub and PDP for application-level authorization.
- Aserto: Aserto is an enterprise authorization service built on top of Open Policy Agent (OPA), targeting the same externalized authorization use cases as Cerbos including fine-grained policy evaluation and audit logs.
- AuthZed: AuthZed commercializes SpiceDB, an open-source ReBAC authorization system. It competes directly with Cerbos for relationship-based and fine-grained application authorization.
- Styra (Cisco): Styra, acquired by Cisco, is the primary commercial entity behind Open Policy Agent (OPA). It is a direct competitor to Cerbos in policy-as-code and externalized authorization for cloud-native workloads.
- Warrant: Warrant provides a developer-first authorization service with ReBAC and RBAC primitives, targeting similar application developers and engineering teams as Cerbos.
Broad incumbents
- Okta: Okta is a leading identity and access management platform that owns authentication at many of the same enterprise buyers Cerbos targets. It is a strategic competitor and integration partner, with potential to extend deeper into authorization.
- Auth0 (Okta): Auth0 is a major CIAM platform that provides authentication and increasingly authorization features. It competes broadly with Cerbos at the application identity/authorization layer and is also an integration partner.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS Verified Permissions): AWS Verified Permissions is a managed externalized authorization service from a hyperscaler, representing a structural competitor that can bundle authorization with broader cloud infrastructure spend.
- Microsoft Entra ID: Microsoft Entra ID is the incumbent identity platform for enterprise Microsoft estates and is extending into fine-grained authorization, positioning it as both a partner and potential competitor to Cerbos.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks7 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Cerbos social profiles
Digital presenceCerbos compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance9 records
Cerbos financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Cerbos leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles4 records
Cerbos funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds2 records
Investors11 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Cerbos M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Cerbos
What does Cerbos do?
Cerbos provides an end-to-end enterprise authorization management platform built on an open-source Policy Decision Point (PDP). The platform consists of the open-source Cerbos PDP engine for evaluating access decisions, Cerbos Hub as a cloud control plane for authoring, testing, versioning and distributing policies, and Cerbos Synapse for data enrichment and orchestration. It enforces fine-grained authorization through YAML-based policies supporting RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC and PBAC models with sub-millisecond decision latency, sold to engineering, security and IAM teams for both traditional applications and AI agent workloads.
Is Cerbos a public or private company?
Cerbos is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Cerbos founded?
Cerbos was founded in 2021. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is Cerbos based?
Cerbos is headquartered in London, United Kingdom, in the Europe region.
How does Cerbos make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Cerbos PDP (Open Source) is the primary driver. The others are cerbos Hub (Cloud Management), cerbos Synapse and enterprise Support & SLA.
Who are Cerbos's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Oso, Permit.io, Aserto, AuthZed, Styra (Cisco) and Warrant. Broad incumbents are Okta, Auth0 (Okta), Amazon Web Services (AWS Verified Permissions) and Microsoft Entra ID.
Does Cerbos have an API?
Yes. Cerbos provides a language-agnostic API for authorization decisions. The PDP (Policy Decision Point) evaluates requests against policies and returns access decisions. SDKs are available for JS, Python, Go, Rust, Java, and .NET to authorize requests from application code. Policies are defined using YAML configurations. Developer documentation is at docs.cerbos.dev/cerbos/latest/index.html.
What industry is Cerbos in?
Cerbos's product category is Authorization Management Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEAKAG, Business Rules & Decision Management Platforms (BRMS/DMN), with a secondary code of HDAEAHAE, Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) & Decision Automation. Its NAICS code is 5415 and its SIC code is 7372.