Nathanael Coffing, CEO, Cloudentity. (Cloudentity Photo)

After realizing that it was building the same cloud security solution over and over again for consulting clients trying to manage traffic flowing between cloud services, Seattle’s Cloudentity went into the product business a year ago and just scored new funding from one of its key partners.

Previously known as Syntegrity Networks, Cloudentity relaunched itself as product company a year ago and its 65 employees are now working on a product that helps companies using cloud-based microservices protect their internal traffic. According to a recent filing with the SEC, the company just raised $2 million out of an expected $5 million round in early January.

That’s the first time the company has taken outside investment, said Joshua Ciccone, senior marketing manager for Cloudentity. Until now profits from the consulting business have financed the development of the product, but the company is shifting consulting contracts over to product contracts as it continues to build out new features.

Cloudentity’s product is similar to the service mesh concept or the idea of “zero trust” networks, but approaches the problem from the single sign-on angle, as in products like Okta or Microsoft’s Active Directory. It has both identity management and network-traffic management features that help companies protect traffic flowing between different cloud providers through APIs, which is new and different compared to tactics for managing traffic moving between equipment in a data center.

The company is working with several partners to distribute the product, and one of those partners is behind the $2 million round, Ciccone said. The company may chose to take on traditional venture capital as part of the remaining $3 million on offer, but isn’t ready to commit to one strategy or another when it comes to funding, he said.

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