Founders in Focus: Joel Bauman of Synqly
Each month, we’ll highlight one of the founders of Okta Ventures’ portfolio companies. You’ll learn more about them and how they work with Okta. This month, we’re speaking with Joel Bauman of Synqly.
What is Synqly, and what is your mission?
Synqly offers the first Integration Platform-as-a-Service (IPaaS) for security and infrastructure vendors. The company’s mission is to remove barriers to product integrations and create a more robust cybersecurity ecosystem by enabling secure, scalable, and sustainable connections between technologies. This addresses the growing complexity of enterprise tech stacks, where the average security team manages over 75 products. Security vendors need a reliable and scalable way to provide integrations using fewer resources. Synqly is simplifying and automating product integrations to reduce the burden on product teams and strengthen the security ecosystem.
What were you doing before Synqly that led you here?
I’ve been building technology ecosystems my entire career. After earning my BA from Duke University and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin, I focused on bridging the gaps between technologies. At McAfee and Cylance, I built strategic partnerships and executed acquisitions, learning firsthand how fragmented APIs and manual integration processes crippled security teams.
When I joined Illumio as SVP of Business and Corporate Development, I saw the same problem magnified: businesses juggling dozens of security tools with no unified way to connect them. It reminded me of my early days at BMC Software and Webroot, where integration roadblocks stifled innovation. At Cylance, we pioneered AI-driven endpoint security, but even cutting-edge solutions struggled without seamless interoperability.
The turning point came when I realized every integration followed the same broken playbook — months of custom coding, brittle maintenance, and vendor lock-in. I’d spent 20 years watching companies reinvent the wheel for every API handshake. In 2023, I co-founded Synqly to build what the ecosystem desperately needed: an Integration Platform-as-a-Service (IPAAS) designed for security and IT Operations (ITOps) vendors.
What is Synqly’s solution? What challenge does it solve?
The Synqly Integration Platform enables security and infrastructure software vendors to deploy any requested integration — without sacrificing expensive resources from product and engineering teams. Our platform reduces the cost and complexity of building, maintaining, and supporting software integrations by as much as 90% and similarly shrinks time to market.
The average enterprise company purchases over 75 different security and ITOps products (an increase of 750% from just 8 years ago). Fast and secure integrations are required to simplify management and maximize product value, and vendors are expected to provide integrated solutions. The challenge has always been the resources that product and engineering teams require to build and support integrations while juggling their own product development.
The platform empowers security, ITOps, and Managed Security Service Provider vendors to integrate software products through a single API, offering the market's most rapid integration process. Synqly ensures that integrations remain current with the latest API updates from target vendors. With continuous performance monitoring and metrics, vendors swiftly identify and rectify integration issues and monitor usage statistics, saving valuable time and improving the customer experience.
Central to our innovation is a unique abstraction layer that facilitates connections between cybersecurity and infrastructure software; this eliminates the need for vendors to familiarize themselves with each other's APIs, enabling seamless operations between cybersecurity and ITOps. The platform's Multiplex Connectors, designed for distinct use cases such as security information and event management (SIEM) solutions (ticketing systems and endpoint security), allow for integration across multiple solutions within the same category without bespoke connections.
We remove longstanding barriers to product integrations, enabling cybersecurity and infrastructure vendors to seamlessly integrate and empower their customers to stay ahead of evolving threats.
Why did Synqly want to work with Okta?
We collaborated with Okta Ventures for several strategic reasons. Okta's Identity Access Management (IAM) leadership aligns perfectly with Synqly's focus on secure, standardized integrations. This expertise in Identity integration provides valuable insights and potential synergies for Synqly's platform. Okta's extensive partner network and strong marketplace presence offer Synqly significant opportunities to scale its integration capabilities, potentially accelerating its growth and market reach. Lastly, both organizations share a vision that prioritizes interoperability to reduce security fragmentation in the industry. This alignment is evident in Okta Ventures' emphasis on extending platform value through partnerships, which resonates with Synqly's mission to streamline security integrations across diverse ecosystems.
How is Synqly working with Okta? What support do you look for in a corporate partner?
Synqly's relationship with Okta spans multiple dimensions: as a technology partner, marketplace vendor, and customer.
Synqly has integrated Okta's platform into its integration framework, offering security and ITOps teams powerful capabilities to manage the Okta environment. Organizations can leverage our platform to:
- Monitor potential security threats by analyzing Okta audit logs
- Access comprehensive user and group information
- Execute critical security actions like terminating sessions or forcing password resets
Our partnership approach, including our partnership with Okta, focuses on two key elements:
- Ecosystem Growth: We're excited to partner with Okta to expand the security ecosystem. We aim to cement this relationship, working toward becoming Okta's recommended solution for security partners needing Okta integration capabilities.
- Learning and Development: As a growing security company, we value learning from industry leaders like Okta. We're particularly interested in adopting best practices from both Okta and their portfolio companies as we continue building our business.
We’re also in Okta's Integration Network, which serves a community of 13,000+ global enterprises. This enables Synqly to deliver frictionless security integrations through Okta's Identity-powered partner ecosystem. We understand firsthand the value of these integrations through using Okta's security infrastructure in our operations.
What trends do you expect to see in the IAM industry?
The IAM industry in 2025 is rapidly evolving to address complex security challenges and hybrid workforce demands. Key trends include:
- Identity-focused attack tactics, such as credential theft, lateral movement, and phishing. To stop these attacks, there will be a growing demand for Identity vendors to safeguard Identity-related data and automate access controls for multiple products.
- Adoption of zero-trust frameworks, focusing on least-privilege access and continuous verification for human and machine identities.
- AI and machine learning will continue to transform IAM through real-time anomaly detection, automated access governance, behavioral biometrics, and contextual signals for risk-based authentication.
- Blockchain-based self-sovereign Identity models are gaining traction, allowing users to control credential sharing without intermediaries.
- With B2B identities projected to outnumber internal users, delegated administration and granular access for partners will be crucial.
- Passwordless authentication methods, such as passkeys and biometrics, will replace traditional passwords, while enhanced MFA integrates hardware-bound credentials to combat sophisticated attacks.
These trends underscore a shift toward adaptive, ecosystem-aware IAM that balances security with user experience.
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