Cerbos

Cerbos is a self-hosted, open source authorization layer that separates your authorization logic from your core application code.

The story so far

Founded by Emre Baran and Charith Ellawala, in 2021, Cerbos is on a mission to make authorization simpler to implement and manage, so product teams have more time to focus on building their core products.

Having previously worked on various data infrastructure projects at companies including Google, Elastic and CGI, the founders had continuously encountered challenges with developers having to write their own authorization code.

Authorization is a critical aspect of any software product, but notoriously difficult to implement, maintain, and scale.

Cerbos is an open source, language-agnostic authorization solution allowing seamless scalability from a prototype to global deployment. Cerbos users can be up and running in minutes rather than weeks.

OMERS Ventures first invested in Cerbos in 2023.

Themes

Infrastructure Software

Founded

2021

OMERS First Investment

2023

Emre Baran

Before Cerbos, Emre was co-founder and CTO of Qubit (now part of Coveo) where he built the engineering and product team and created its data infrastructure, which processed more than 25 billion events daily in real-time. Prior, he was at Google where he built multiple products that generated more than an additional $1 billion in revenue for Google’s advertising product portfolio. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of Yonja.com), Turkey’s largest social network in the mid 2000s.

ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Charith Ellawala

Charith previously worked on large-scale data-processing platforms, distributed systems and API services at Elastic, Qubit and Ocado. He is interested in security, programming languages, optimization and cloud native technologies.