Gatehouse: Identity infrastructure for developers

Gatehouse handles sign-up, login and permissions for software teams that would rather not build them. A developer adds a few lines of code and gets passwords, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and role-based access, with an audit trail that holds up in enterprise security reviews.

Ethan and Lior had both spent years maintaining homegrown authentication systems at larger companies and knew how much engineering time disappeared into them. Theo led the seed round in 2014, one of Fund I’s first investments in the US, and spent much of the following year helping the company close its first enterprise customers.

When Cobalt Systems acquired Gatehouse in 2020, its API was handling more than two billion authentication requests a month across 11,000 applications. The product now forms the identity layer of Cobalt’s developer platform, and both founders stayed on for three years after the deal.