Vlad Matsiiako is in the business of secrets.
“If secrets aren’t there, then it’s just not possible for software to run,” said Matsiiako, CEO and cofounder of Infisical. “Databases can’t connect to each other. Developers can’t use any resources. AI agents can’t integrate with the whole ecosystem. Basically, secrets are the glue that connects everything. And if they’re not there, there’s no way for organizations to secure systems. They can’t really run things, it’s not really operational. The majority of vulnerabilities these days are still related to secrets and identities.”
Secrets refer to any and all sensitive information that protects and authorizes access to systems—think: passwords, encryption keys, API keys, and more. And Infisical is a secrets management platform for developers and companies, offering the tech to securely store, change, and retrieve vital credentials. Founded in 2022 by Matsiiako with Tony Dang and Maidul Islam, Infisical’s now raised a $16 million Series A, led by Elad Gil. Y Combinator, Gradient, and Dynamic Fund participated, plus angels like Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, Samsara CEO, and Valor CEO Antonio Gracias.
Infisical’s current customers include Hugging Face, Lucid, and LG. At first, Matsiiako expected he’d be mostly selling to tech companies, but found that non-tech-centric sectors were drawn to the product—banks, pharmaceutical companies, government, manufacturers, and mining organizations with extensive software infrastructure requiring secret management. Infisical has been expanding its product suite over the last year, to things like certificate management and SSH key management, and more.
“We’re working with AI agents right now,” said Matsiiako, who’s originally from Ukraine. “Right now, the biggest growth area is all of these AI workloads, agents and applications—Cursor and so on. They write so much code, but they can only write code as quickly as they get access to different databases and different resources.”
The secrets business is big—HashiCorp, an incumbent, sold to IBM for $6.4 billion in a deal finalized in February. And most reports show secrets management to be a growing market, worth well into the billions by 2030. In Infisical’s case, the company said that it’s cash flow positive and has grown revenue by 20 times over the last year. (The startup declined to disclose revenue.)
“As an investor and founder, I really look for things where there’s a strong market pull,” said investor Elad Gil. “You can be Sisyphus, rolling the boulder uphill all day. Or you can find something where the boulder’s rolling downhill a little on its own—or at least, where the founder is pushing really hard, but gravity is helping. So, you’re looking for the startup version of positive gravity…You want that market pull because without it, you’re doing everything. And Infisical had that really clear product-market fit, that pull from customers who really wanted what they were building.”
There were, of course, moments when the Infisical team did have to push boulders. Matsiiako, Dang, and Islam met as students at Cornell and cycled through other startup ideas—a VR marketplace, for one—before landing on secrets. They faced a time crunch in incorporating the company: They’d both just gotten into YC and as international students, they had visas to think about. The name “Infisical” was born from that urgency, a blend of “infinity” and “physical”—meant to evoke something both expansive and tangible.
And though the company has made fast progress—Infisical’s software has been downloaded more than 40 million times globally in the past year—the early days were tough. When they entered Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch, Infisical was a closed-source SaaS tool for managing developer secrets. The product worked technically, but the team struggled to gain traction and earn users’ trust. A candid talk with YC group partner and managing director Dalton Caldwell changed everything.
“Obviously, there were [open source] YC success stories, like GitLab or Docker,” said Matsiiako. “We were talking to Dalton, who’d worked with GitLab and others. We were like: We’re hearing we need to open source this, but what if we lose our IP rights? And Dalton said: ‘Guys, this thing is not working. What IP rights are you talking about? Just do it.’”
The following week, the Infisical team open sourced the tech. It went viral, especially via Reddit. They woke up the next morning to users telling them that developer newsletters were featuring the project, a deluge of feature requests, and their first international contributor.
“Now, people could actually see the code,” said Matsiiako. “They could see how the encryption works. And that was where trust came from.”
As it turns out, secrets can only be shared with trust.
IPO wrap…On Thursday, Circle went public on the NYSE, raising $1.05 billion. Today, Omada Health is slated to go public on the Nasdaq, targeting a $1 billion valuation. And not an IPO, but a ‘wow’: Anduril is now valued at $30.5 billion. Read my colleague Jessica Mathews’ story here.
See you Monday,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com