What it sells
Authorization Infrastructure securing AI at OpenAI, Zoom, & more
Business model breakdown
Buyer: who owns the budget?
UnverifiedPlatform / security engineering leads and CTOs at software companies and enterprises needing fine-grained permissions.
Trigger: what makes them buy now?
Replacing hand-built or legacy authorization as apps scale, and securing AI agents, RAG and LLM data access with permission-aware retrieval.
Workflow: what inputs become what output?
Model permissions as a relationship graph in SpiceDB (open source Zanzibar-style), call it to check access per request, and use AuthZed Materialize for permission-aware lists and search.
Economics: what it saves and how it charges
Open-core: free Apache-2.0 SpiceDB; paid managed Cloud billed by resource usage, Dedicated Cloud by reserved vCPU, and self-hosted enterprise annual licences per region and vCPU.
Distribution: how it reaches customers
Open-source community adoption (7,000+ GitHub stars), self-serve cloud sign-up, plus demo/quote sales; named customer OpenAI.
Funding history and coverage
| Round date | Stage | Amount | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | Y Combinator Winter 2021 | — | Y Combinator | ycombinator.com |
Profiles summarize public reporting and company websites. Business-model notes are MaxBC's reading of that material, not confirmed facts; unknowns are left blank rather than guessed. Updated 2026-10-12.