Infisical: The Open Source Security Stack

Key Takeaways

Today I'm excited to welcome Inysysical who just announced your series A led by Eladgill. So we have here Vlad Mul and Tony. So tell us what Inysysical is. We're an open-source secrets mention platform. So we help developers across all types of companies you know from the fastest growing AI companies like Hugging Face to very large Fortune 100 enterprises like LG. We help them manage sensitive credentials across their infrastructure. um and yeah solving lots of very complicated problems in the security and infrastructure spaces. What are these secrets you manage and how many are you managing? Yeah, I mean you can think about secrets anything that's sensitive for developer infrastructure. So anything from database access tokens to certificates to API keys to any types of credentials that developers have to manage and at this point it's billions and and you know north of 10 billion per month uh that we are processing at Infysical. Let's go back to the founding origin story of Inysysical. How did all the three of you meet and decide to be co-founders? Sure. Uh so we all met at Cornell uh throughout college essentially. We were hacking together different side projects over the years um ultimately which culminated in physical and you know this isn't our first rodeo working on something um we had worked on a different project uh before but it was just only a matter of time uh in terms of figuring out you know what is it uh to build next and that became in physical I remember you guys had actually applied with that previous idea and didn't get into YC on the first try uh but you kept working on it and found another idea which became in physical and God in in your second try. And how did you land on this new idea? It's a bit of a kind of esoteric idea for new college grads. Yeah, I can I can speak a little bit about it. Um, so yeah, Tony mentioned we worked on like a number of uh different things before in physical and one of the common themes that uh they all had was the ENV file and uh this is something we've seen kind of time and time again and uh it it's you know it's it's difficult to kind of pass around sensitive information even with a smaller team. Um and so we wanted to go out and solve thev file. How do you make sure that things are syncing between teammates? And so that was really the core focus when we started because you were hacking all all these projects and you kept having to add all these secrets somewhere. Yeah, exactly. And and that's kind of how we started uh in physical and so we started off with this uh problem set which obviously evolved into a ton of other things but that was kind of the start of it. when you had applied to the batch with this idea, you were actually closed source and then during the batch you decided to open source it and that became a key advantage from you. You went from zero to 5,000 GitHub stars in the span of just like less than two three months and now two years later you're at 18,000 and over GitHub stars. Yeah. Uh I mean even during the NYC interview one of the questions you asked us back then was like you know why are you not open source and and I think at that point you know we we were building in physical it was closed source which is kind of like a simpler SAS tool that developers could sign up for and we got into IC but then eventually growth kind of flattened out and you know it wasn't really growing that much and so we were talking to to you and and you know in general like what we we should do and the problems that we kept hearing from people right is that they want to have more trust and they want to manage these secrets. on their own infrastructure. And so for us kind of like going open source look kind of like in the retrospect actually is a very logical decision because you know people feel much more comfortable about it and and they're able to satisfy a lot of different compliance and security requirements that these enterprises have. I think the wildest thing I remember during the batch you actually got a lot of very big enterprises using your product because of this. And the crazy thing is that just couple months later, one of those users ended up becoming a big customer and it's like a Fortune50 company. Tell us about how that happened. Exactly. I mean a lot of people who find us, they eventually, you know, at this point we have like very big developer mind share and developer community around in physical, right? So a lot of people who find us, they, you know, might have been self-hosting in physical for a long time. Maybe in their home labs, right? Like maybe they're using it for some weekend projects. maybe they are starting to adopt it within their company because it's easy, right? And for self-hosted solutions, you can just do it very easily. And so with this company specifically, right, it was like some people who actually used in physical uh at at the old company and then they switched to to a new enterprise and they also introduced in physical there and it's also a very big channel for how developers and companies adopt in physical too. Very cool. And that got you to close this Fortune50 company. You also got this large semiconductor company using your same deal, right? Yeah, I mean at this point it's you know any industry you name it, banking, uh healthcare, government, defense. So anything and and it's kind of like crazy to think that you know at this point in physical security is a very non-trivial part of world's infrastructure out there. So there's an interesting thing about your company is that at the surface people could think that you're going after a very competitive space because as you started the company there were exist existing solutions like Hashi Corp vault or AWS secrets management but you guys did something special because you closed some large deals like tell us about this big contract you got going on this is a different one. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of different contracts. One that comes to mind is a big defense federal defense company with north of 20,000 employees. They decided to go with in physical over some of the existing solutions that you mentioned. Um, and when I think about why they chose in physical, I think about our core product philosophy, which is to make security more accessible to all developers and all engineers at large. And that's something that other existing competition in the market hasn't done really well. Um, we exist in a market with a lot of legacy tooling in place, a lot of very cumbersome technology that takes in the order of, you know, I think the average uh deployment time for this type of tooling is in the order of 21 months. That's crazy. Um and so when you can reduce your deployment time from 21 months down to just a few months or even a few weeks um becomes a magical experience for a lot of these customers and you know that's why they turn to Infysical over other solutions. So so what's the tech underneath my duel? Yeah. So uh in physical is really uh interesting because it needs to be it needs to really accommodate a lot of different environments and this is different from uh a lot of other products that that are on the market right we need to uh be as simple as possible to deploy in on premise right that's where a lot of our largest customers are um and uh unlike other products right you're really only thinking about getting the feature out to production here every time we think about you know making a new feature, a new project that we're working on, it's it's always how do we uh how is the self-hosting experience going to be for customers? And uh unlike other secrets management tooling that are on the on the market, um we really really care a lot about how the solution is uh going to be deployed on prem and that comes with a lot of interesting engineering challenges, right? And so uh one of the common challenges with uh you know secrets manage other secrets management tooling is that they treat the application um as a database and so that makes it really difficult to scale up um in high availability settings right and so in physical is actually stateless and so this is a big difference um is because you can let's say that you you want to scale up your fleet right uh within physical you can essentially just replicate across because all the containers are stateless versus uh other secrets management tooling where you actually need to make sure the data is persistent on each of these new replicas before you can even think about scaling up. And so there's a lot of overhead uh that that comes up. That's cool. So how are you guys feeling about in physical in the future? Super optimistic. I will say I think when I think about in physical in the future there's really two things. Uh the first thing is to continue forward with that mission of making security more accessible to all developers. I think what started as a open-source secrets management platform is now becoming much more. It is now launching into from secrets management into certificate management within physical PKI into SSH access with our new product line in physical SSH into encryption as a service within physical KMS. You know, we are working our way towards from becoming just this secrets management platform into a much fuller uh open-source security infrastructure platform. And the second thing that I think is really interesting is to think about uh this AI world that's coming up in front of us and what in physical's role essentially is in that future world. Um and so I think in the past we've mainly been thinking about users and machines accessing infrastructure and the tooling built around that. But what's interesting here is now we almost have a new kind of actor and this is in the form of an AI agent which also needs access to resources and even needs to be able to trust and talk to each other as well. So I feel like there is a future kind of uh world here where in physical will secure access uh for AI agents to infrastructure. So this is really cool future where you're going after lots of stuff to build. So tell us a bit about the kinds of roles you're hiring for. Yeah, I mean we are hiring across 15 plus different positions right now spanning through engineering to go to market as well. So anything from front end and full stack engineers over into account executives and also even on the operational side as well in terms of recruiters too um and even devril as well. Um, so really there's a lot of different uh positions uh to fill. Okay, very cool guys. So, thank you so much for coming and joining us. That's it. Thank you. Thank you.