authzed

AuthZed is an authorization software company focused exclusively on permissions infrastructure for applications and AI systems. Its core technology is SpiceDB, an open-source, Google Zanzibar-inspired database for storing and querying fine-grained authorization data, written in Go and accompanied by tooling such as a Kubernetes operator (spicedb-operator) and a command-line tool (zed). Customers define a permission model once using a schema language, write relationship data, and evaluate access with a single checkPermission call rather than maintaining bespoke conditional logic in application code.

The product line spans a multi-tenant permissions-system-as-a-service launched in 2021, AuthZed Dedicated (a single-tenant, IaaS-style managed SpiceDB introduced in summer 2022), AuthZed Cloud (self-service, hourly metered provisioning aimed at smaller teams), and Materialize, which applies materialized-view and incremental view maintenance concepts to relationship-based access control (ReBAC) to accelerate checks and emit an access-control change stream. Stated capabilities include tunable per-check consistency, attribute-based conditions via SpiceDB Caveats, centralized schema management, audit logging, REST and gRPC APIs with SDKs for Go, TypeScript and Python, and interfaces for AI use cases such as agent tool-call checks, per-document access for retrieval-augmented generation, and scopes for MCP.

Use cases marketed by the company include sharing and link access, team-based access control, customer-managed permissions for enterprise end users, replacement of legacy in-house authorization code, permission-aware lists and search, and permission filtering for RAG pipelines. Security and compliance attributes listed include encryption at rest, fully isolated deployments, private VPC interconnectivity, fine-grained API key management, SOC 2 certification, and GDPR/CCPA alignment.

Founding story

Founders Jake Moshenko, Joey Schorr and Jimmy Zelinskie previously built Quay, the first private Docker registry; Moshenko and Schorr met on Google's APIs team in 2010 and Zelinskie joined Quay as their first hire, with the group later working as leaders at CoreOS and Red Hat. While adding authorization to Quay they found simple role-based code could not keep pace with demands for organizations, nested teams, namespaces and default permissions, and that policy engines and IAM-style approaches did not fit their relationship-heavy data. After Google published the 2019 Zanzibar paper describing its centralized authorization system, they formed AuthZed in 2020 to commercialize those concepts.

Business model

AuthZed sells commercial authorization infrastructure built around the open-source SpiceDB project, offering managed and self-service deployments (Dedicated, Cloud) alongside the free open-source database, which serves as an adoption channel for paid products.

Subscription and consumption-based software revenue; AuthZed Cloud is described as pay-as-you-grow with hourly metered billing invoiced monthly in arrears, with no annual commitment or procurement cycle required, while Dedicated is a single-tenant managed offering for larger organizations.

Traction

The company reported millions in revenue with more than tripling annual growth as of mid-2024 and six times ARR growth in 2023 off an undisclosed base. SpiceDB's GitHub repository showed roughly 6,990 stars and 413 forks at the time of review, up from over 4,500 stars in mid-2024, with over 2,300 Discord community members reported then. AuthZed states its platform serves tens of billions of permission checks daily.

Latest developments

In June 2024 AuthZed closed a $12 million Series A led by General Catalyst to bring Materialize to general availability and build a Dedicated-style offering for smaller and midsized businesses. Subsequent work includes AuthZed Cloud, a self-service metered platform positioned for AI agents and RAG pipelines, plus lab projects showcased at the August 2025 anniversary event: a Postgres connector, Materialize and AuthZed MCP servers.