authzed GTM brain

category

market profile

• text: Enterprise applications and AI retrieval systems must enforce permissions consistently as sharing relationships and data volumes grow.
• text: Teams choose between maintaining their own authorization system, open-source deployment and supported managed infrastructure.
• text: Large customers include OpenAI, Zoom and Workday, demonstrating demand in AI and enterprise collaboration workloads.

personas

• title: Platform engineering leader
  pains:

  • Homegrown permission logic fragments across services and delays feature delivery.
  • Maintaining performance, consistency and upgrades at scale consumes engineering capacity.
• title: AI application or search engineering lead
  pains:

  • RAG and agentic search must respect existing access controls across large document collections.
  • Permission filtering must not make retrieval unacceptably slow.
• title: Security architect
  pains:

  • Inconsistent authorization across resources increases risk of unauthorized access.
  • Enterprise customers demand auditable controls, isolation and predictable enforcement.

icp

• text: B2B SaaS and enterprise application vendors with multi-tenant sharing, complex resource relationships or customer-managed permissions.
• text: AI platform teams building RAG or agentic search over permissioned enterprise data.
• text: Regulated or larger organizations needing supported self-hosted or dedicated cloud deployments.

message pillars

• text: Keep application and agent permissions current as AI adoption grows.
• text: Unify permission definition and enforcement across applications.
• text: Offload the burden of custom permissions code so engineers can build product features.

objections

• objection: We can build authorization ourselves.
  response: Compare the full lifecycle cost of consistency, scaling, schema evolution and operations with a focused pilot and production support.
• objection: We cannot use a shared managed service for sensitive permissions.
  response: AuthZed lists supported self-managed and dedicated cloud options; validate isolation, region and compliance requirements in a security review.
• objection: Will permission checks meet our performance needs?
  response: Benchmark the actual relationship graph and workload; customer examples are useful evidence but not a guarantee for another deployment.

competitors

• name: Okta
  why: OpenFGA and managed FGA compete for fine-grained relationship-based authorization.
• name: Oso
  why: Commercial authorization platform for application developers.
• name: Permit.io
  why: Developer authorization platform with managed policy infrastructure.
• name: Cerbos
  why: Authorization policy engine and commercial platform.

influencers

• name: Jake Moshenko
  url: https://authzed.com/about
  why: CEO and co-founder writes and speaks on Zanzibar-style authorization.

keywords

• fine grained authorization
• SpiceDB managed hosting
• Zanzibar permissions database
• RAG permissions enforcement
• relationship based access control
• authorization as a service
• OpenFGA alternative

voice

• technical and authoritative
• security-focused
• direct and performance-conscious

signals

• text: An engineering team is replacing scattered role checks with a shared authorization platform.
• text: A company is launching enterprise AI search over access-controlled internal documents.
• text: An open-source SpiceDB deployment is moving to production and needs managed operations or support.

stack

• SpiceDB
• Kubernetes
• OpenTelemetry
• Datadog
• Terraform

hiring

• Senior Site Reliability Engineer, listed on YC jobs; verify current status

pricing

motion

channels

• GitHub
• developer community
• SEO
• events
• LinkedIn
• sales

confidence

Founders

• name: Jake Moshenko
  title: Founder
  role: Founder
  bio: Jake Moshenko is an engineering leader that has been building infrastructure tools and services for over 15 years for large companies and startups alike. Having previously struggled to keep up with customer permissions demands on products such as CoreOS’s Quay and Tectonic, he was searching for a better way to do application permissions.
• name: Jimmy Zelinskie
  title: Founder
  role: Founder
  bio: Jimmy Zelinskie is a software engineer and product leader with the goal of empowering the world through the democratization of software via open source development. He's currently the CPO and cofounder of authzed where he's focused on bringing hyperscaler best-practices in authorization software to the industry at large.
• name: Joseph Schorr
  title: Founder
  role: Founder