The Long Game Pays Off: Announcing SGNL’s Next Chapter

Today, we’re excited to share that SGNL has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CrowdStrike! In an environment where meaningful venture exits have been hard to come by, SGNL is a powerful reminder that outstanding founders working on real problems with discipline and clarity can build enduring value quickly.

This outcome wasn’t driven by hype or shortcuts. It came from long-term thinking, deep customer empathy, and a willingness to tackle one of the hardest problems in enterprise security. Under the leadership of Founders Scott Kriz and Erik Gustavson, along with Atul Tulshibagwale, Prathima Rao, and Ching-Yu Hu, SGNL invented the CAEP protocol and created a platform that enterprises knew they needed but didn’t always know how to adopt. Even though this looks like an overnight success, the team had to listen carefully and craft entry points that let customers get started and see value early. I’ll posit that what really made this acquisition happen was seeing the early success of the first couple of F50 customers and their aggressive plans to roll out more broadly once they saw it delivered on its promise. In what can be the morass of IAM, SGNL’s approach really works - and it will now have more impact, more quickly operating under CrowdStrike's huge umbrella.

We foresaw (maybe imagined) glimpses of this future state when we led SGNL’s Seed financing in late 2021 and have been thrilled to have partnered closely with the team from the very beginning. But our story with SGNL began long before the company did. I first met Scott Kriz and Erik Gustavson almost a decade ago when they were building their previous company, Bitium. While we didn’t invest, I could tell immediately that they were the kind of founders we back: thoughtful, resilient, and deeply committed to doing the hard, often unglamorous work of building something lasting. We stayed in touch, and watched closely to see how they navigated challenges, built teams people loved working on, and continued sharpening their thinking around identity.

After Bitium was acquired by Google, Scott and Erik kept working on Identity and Access Management (IAM) — now with the perspective that comes from operating at Google-scale. They saw an industry struggling under its own complexity: hundreds of applications, multiple directories, static permissions, and a growing mix of human and non-human identities that legacy systems simply weren’t built to handle.

They didn’t believe the world needed another point solution. They believed it needed an entirely new framework. So, from the beginning, SGNL set out to reimagine authorization—not as something static, but as something continuous, contextual, and adaptive. Modern enterprises need Continuous Identity and just-in-time access. Lots of startups underestimated just how hard this problem is to solve. But SGNL was able to bring order to chaos in a way that delivered real customer value early and scale over time.

To Scott, Erik, and the entire SGNL team: thank you for letting us be part of your journey. It’s a privilege to work alongside founders who consistently show up with integrity, curiosity, and resolve. We’re excited to see what you and SGNL do next.