SYS:ABOUT // InferaDB

The authorization company

Name: InferaDB
Author: InferaDB

Founded by engineers behind OpenFGA at Auth0. Purpose-built authorization infrastructure for modern software.

SEC.01 Origin

We spent years building authorization at Auth0 and Okta — including OpenFGA, now a CNCF incubating project used in production by Grafana Labs, Docker, and Canonical. We shipped software that millions of developers depend on. And we kept running into the same wall.

Every existing approach relies on general-purpose databases that weren't designed for this workload. Every system trades correctness for performance, or performance for auditability. Every architecture assumes application-level multi-tenancy is good enough — until a cross-tenant data leak proves it isn't.

We set out to build what we wished we could have built at Auth0: purpose-built authorization infrastructure. Custom storage engine. Cryptographic isolation. Consensus replication. Not another policy engine bolted onto a general-purpose database. A fundamentally different architecture — delivered as a managed service.

SEC.02 Design Principles

Every decision is explainable

Authorization is derived from reasoning over relationships, not static role lookups. Each decision is a provable inference — explainable, traceable, independently auditable.

Consistency above all

Eventual consistency is unacceptable for authorization. If Alice revokes Bob's access, Bob must lose access immediately — not eventually. Raft consensus with revision tokens makes this a guarantee.

Transparent trust

Every decision is cryptographically signed, hash-chained, and replayable. Auditors can independently verify that no records have been altered — without trusting the server.

Developer-centric experience

Authorization should be understandable, testable, and observable. Branch, test, and merge permission schemas like code. Integrate in under 30 minutes. The tooling matters as much as the throughput.

SEC.03 Team

Evan Sims

Co-Founder & CTO

20+ years in identity, security, and infrastructure engineering. Founding engineer on Auth0's fine-grained authorization team at Okta, where he helped build OpenFGA — now a CNCF incubating project used in production by Grafana Labs, Docker, and Canonical. Led Auth0's open-source SDK ecosystem serving millions of developers and helped lead FedRAMP certification. Brings deep expertise in distributed systems, storage engines, and the Rust ecosystem to InferaDB's architecture.

Jane Sims

Co-Founder & CEO

Jane spent decades building and scaling a multimillion dollar construction company from the ground up — managing complex operations, regulated environments, enterprise procurement cycles, and the kind of compliance pressure that keeps executives awake at night. She knows what it costs when the wrong person accesses the wrong system, because she's lived on the other side of that risk. At InferaDB she owns go-to-market strategy, enterprise relationships, and the business development motion that converts developer adoption into enterprise contracts. She brings something rare to deep tech: the operator's instinct for what regulated businesses actually buy, and why.

SEC.04 By the Numbers

2.8µs p99 read latency

4.9B checks/sec on commodity hardware

6 compliance frameworks supported

10 SDK languages planned

200+ teams on the waitlist

100% open source core

SEC.05 Open Source & Standards

InferaDB's core authorization engine is open source, dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0. We believe authorization infrastructure should be transparent, auditable, and community-driven.

We implement the OpenID AuthZEN specification — the industry's first standardized authorization API. Our architecture is inspired by Google Zanzibar, the system Google built to handle authorization for YouTube, Drive, and Cloud at trillions of checks per day.

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The authorization company

Origin

Design Principles