Cerbos offers an externalized authorization platform that centralizes policy definition and enforcement for humans, services, and AI agents. Its stateless PDP evaluates human‑readable YAML policies in sub‑millisecond decisions, while the Cerbos Hub and Synapse provide versioned policy management and real‑time data enrichment for fine‑grained, auditable access control across APIs, microservices, and serverless environments.
Funding
$15.3M raised to dateRaised to date based on public sources. This may differ from the amount the company actually raised and is based only on what is publicly available on the internet.
Founders
Product
Problem
Modern applications, AI agents, and microservices often embed authorization logic directly in code, leading to over‑permissive access, difficulty tracking who performed actions, and challenges revoking permissions quickly. This results in security gaps, compliance risks, and increased operational overhead for managing policies across diverse environments.
Solution
Cerbos provides an externalized authorization platform that centralizes policy definition and enforcement for humans, services, and AI agents. Policies are written in human‑readable YAML and evaluated by a high‑performance, stateless Policy Decision Point (PDP) that can run on‑premise, in the cloud, or at the edge. The Cerbos Hub control plane lets teams author, test, version, and distribute policies, while Cerbos Synapse enriches each request with real‑time identity, resource, and relationship data from existing IdPs and databases. Decisions are returned instantly via language‑native SDKs or API calls, enabling fine‑grained, context‑aware access control across APIs, microservices, browsers, mobile apps, and serverless functions. Comprehensive audit logs and policy lineage provide full traceability for compliance and incident response.
Target Audience
Primary customers are engineering teams building enterprise SaaS, microservice architectures, or AI‑driven platforms that need consistent, scalable access control, as well as security and compliance officers responsible for auditability and zero‑trust implementations.
Features
- Centralized policy management with YAML + CEL syntax, supporting RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, and PBAC models
- Cerbos Hub control plane for authoring, testing, versioning, and automated CI/CD policy validation
- Cerbos Synapse data enrichment layer that fetches identity, attributes, and relationships from IdPs, SQL/graph stores, and custom sources
- Stateless PDP engine delivering sub‑millisecond decisions, deployable on Kubernetes, serverless, edge, or air‑gapped environments
- Language‑native SDKs (Go, Java, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, etc.) and WebAssembly support for browser and mobile authorization
- Fine‑grained audit logging with policy version, request context, and decision lineage for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR compliance
- Query‑plan API for permissions‑aware data filtering and row‑level access control
- Flexible policy delivery via Git, CI pipelines, or direct upload, with automatic rollout to all PDPs