With the explosive popularity of B2B services startups, it was only natural that a B2B startup would come along thats offering a service to help startups become enterprise services themselves.WorkOS, which is launching out of stealth with seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others, is building a toolkit to help startups meet the requirements for bringing on enterprise clients.
The company aims to get startups set up with an API for single sign-on, directory sync, audit trails, role-based access controls and other key services.As more startups look to approach enterprise from a bottom-up capacity and focus on creating individual use cases, quickly meeting IT administrators expectations can become a shortcut to higher-margin customers.
The inspiration for WorkOS came from its founders previous email startup, which tried to make a play for enterprise adoption and clients but couldnt cross what he calls the enterprise chasm.The feedback I got was, this is a great app but we cant buy this as a company because youre not enterprise-ready, CEO Michael Grinich told A Technology News Room in an interview.
Even if you focus on the end user experience, theres a different buyer at the end of that tunnel with a different set of needs.Becoming enterprise-ready means meeting the same compliance requirements that IT administrators need to adhere to, something that can obviously be an issue for a small startup thats light on resources.
On the security side, Grinich says that WorkOS is currently in its SOC-2 Type 2 observation period and should receive certification in Q2 of this year.These are uncertain times to be a startup launching publicly, but Grinichs description of his company as a highway onramp to get into [enterprise] ecosystems, seems apt for startups seeking to quickly build out new revenue streams.
Right now, WorkOS operates across a few pricing structures, with a free tier that brings users single sign-on support, as well as a $99/mo developer tier and $499/mo corporate tier that scale up WorkOSs offered functionality substantially.First Round, SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, Tuesday Capital and Work Life Ventures are also backers.