Pomerium is an open-source identity-aware proxy platform from Pomerium Inc., founded in 2019 by Bobby DeSimone (former founder of BeyondTrust) and headquartered in Solana Beach, California. The company has raised $18M in total funding, including a $13.75M Series A led by Benchmark in June 2024, with participation from Bain Capital, Haystack, SNR, and angel investors. The platform has achieved significant traction with over 1 billion Docker downloads and serves organizations from individual developers to Fortune 500 companies.

Pomerium provides clientless, identity-aware access to internal applications, services, and workloads by continuously verifying user identity, device state, and request context before granting access. The platform intercepts and routes traffic through an identity-aware layer, treating each connection as an ongoing series of requests where identity is verified for every action rather than session-based authentication. Available as both self-hosted open source (Apache 2.0 license) and Pomerium Zero (managed control plane with self-hosted proxy), the solution integrates identity providers, implements BeyondCorp zero trust principles, and provides context-aware access decisions based on user, device, location, time, and custom policy rules.

The platform recently introduced Model Context Protocol (MCP) security features for securing AI agent workflows, providing per-request authorization with JWT identity injection and full audit logging. Pomerium eliminates VPN complexity by operating at the application layer with reverse proxy architecture, providing 23x throughput improvement over OAuth2 Proxy while keeping data decryption and inspection within customer infrastructure. Key customers include GovTech Singapore, Traders Club, ExtraHop, and Fortune 2000 enterprises requiring secure remote access, Kubernetes security, and zero trust application access.