WorkOS, a start-up that is financially supported by, among others, the venture capitalists of Lightspeed Venture Partners, is building a toolkit to help young companies attract business clients.
The company offers an API that allows companies to provide single sign-on, directory-synchronisation, audit trails, role-based access control and other services.
Start-ups are focusing more and more on specialised use cases, which means that the expectations of large customers have to be met faster and faster. The inspiration for WorkOS came from the previous email startup of the company’s founder. That company also tried to acquire customers in the enterprise, but couldn’t cross the gap to B2B.
“The feedback I got was, this is a great app but we can’t buy this as a company because you’re not enterprise-ready,” WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich said in a statement. “Even if you focus on the end user experience, there’s a different buyer at the end of that tunnel with a different set of needs.”
Requirements for enterprises
Becoming enterprise-ready has a number of requirements, including meeting the same compliance requirements that IT administrators must follow. This is of course almost impossible for many small start-ups. As far as security is concerned, Grinich says that WorkOS is currently in the observation period for SOC-2 Type 2. In the second quarter of this year, the start-up should receive certification for this.
WorkOS works with a number of pricing models. There is a free version, which gives users support for single sign-on. There is also a developer version that costs $99 per month and a corporate version that costs $499 per month. These last two are the versions, so also directory-synchronisation, audit trails, role-based access control are available. The corporate version is intended for use on a larger scale.
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