Stormpath, the first easy, secure user management and authentication service for developers, today announced it closed $8.2 million in Series A financing. New Enterprise Associates and Pelion Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Flybridge Capital Partners. Today, Stormpath formally exited its beta period with more than 1,000 users onboard and launched general availability of its service.

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Founded in 2011, Stormpath set out to overcome a key security hurdle for cloud-based companies: authentication and management of a large user base. CEO Alex Salazar and CTO Les Hazlewood built a fast, straightforward way for developers to safely store user data and manage access control to the application. With a simple API integration, developers can reduce development and operations costs, while protecting their users with best-in-class security. Offloading common work like authentication, account management, and password reset workflows allows development teams to focus on core business features.

“Stormpath has built an impressive team and is at the heart of cloud infrastructure and developer-driven IT,” said Peter Sonsini, general partner at NEA. “We’re excited by the wave of developer services, and because user management is necessary for every application, every developer can use the service.”

Stormpath is targeting a large and fast-growing market at the intersection of identity and cloud development. According to Forrester Research, the IDM (Identity Management) market will grow to $12 billion in 2014, with cloud adoption growing at 24 percent annually according to 451 Research. Almost half of applications built in the cloud are externally facing, and require robust user management and security infrastructure. Stormpath fills that gap with a secure service that is simple for development teams to deploy and maintain.

“We’re entering the age of plug-and-play architecture, where developers can easily and securely offload commodity infrastructure – like user management, billing, and logging – to API services,” said Alex Salazar, CEO of Stormpath. “Developers don’t want to waste time rebuilding user login for every new app – it’s critical to the business, but not core to their product, and getting it wrong is expensive. Sony got caught on a totally preventable mistake, and it cost them $171 million.”

“Just as developers can use APIs to automate their payment processing with PayPal or messaging with SendGrid and Twilio, they can securely manage and authenticate users with Stormpath,” said Les Hazlewood, Stormpath CTO and PMC Chair of Apache Shiro. “The Stormpath API was painstakingly built from the ground up to cater to developers and simplify their lives. The more they can offload to APIs like Stormpath, the faster they can build their applications.”

“We chose to go with Stormpath because we wanted to avoid account security issues and get PublicAlerter to market quickly,” said Brian Retterer, CEO of PublicAlerter, a service that aggregates data from APIs such as NOAA, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and local law enforcement. “It was much faster than building a user management backend ourselves.”

The Series A round was preceded by a seed round from NEA and Flybridge, and an angel round led by Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Benchmark Capital and CEO at WealthFront.

Stormpath’s user management service is free for developers, with premium features offered in a subscription-based pricing model.

About Stormpath

Stormpath is the first easy, secure user management and authentication service for developers. Fast and intuitive to use, Stormpath enables plug-and-play security and accelerates application development on any platform.

Built for developers, it offers an easy API, open source SDKs, and an active community. The flexible cloud service can manage millions of users with a scalable pricing model that is ideal for projects of any size. By using Stormpath user management and authentication, developers can bring new applications to market faster, reduce development and operations costs, and protect their users with best-in-class security.

About New Enterprise Associates

NEA is a leading venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With about $11 billion in committed capital, the firm invests in information technology, healthcare and energy technology companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. NEA’s long track record of successful investing includes more than 175 portfolio company IPOs and more than 290 acquisitions. For additional information, visit www.nea.com.

About Flybridge Capital Partners

Flybridge Capital Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm whose mission is to assist entrepreneurs in growing innovative, global companies. With $560 million under management, the firm is focused on seed and early-stage investing in technology markets and is led by a team with domain expertise and more than half a century of combined experience in venture capital. The firm has invested in over 60 companies including 10gen (the MongoDB Company), Brontes Technologies (acquired by 3M), Cartera Commerce, Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter) DataXu, Digital Lumens, Open English, Reveal Imaging (acquired by SAIC) and ZING (acquired by Dell). For more information, visit www.flybridge.com or follow us on Twitter @flybridgecap.

About Pelion Venture Partners

Pelion Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs turn early-stage concepts into tomorrow’s industry-leading companies. During the last 25 years, Pelion has backed over 95 companies, resulting in 14 IPOs and 34 acquisitions. In addition to Stormpath, the firm has invested in companies such as Carefx, Cloudflare, Conviva, Fusion-io, Mojiva, MXLogic, Riverbed Technologies, Red Hat, Soasta, and Venafi. For more information, visit www.pelionvp.com