Introducing Spruce
Spruce is reimagining trusted interactions for enterprises and governments — the stewards of the most foundational and impactful layers of infrastructure shaping our lives.
When’s the last time you felt comfortable sending or receiving important documents digitally? Have you ever been shocked at how much an online platform knows about you and wish you had more control over your identity? As a business, do your customers feel any of the above when they’re doing business with you?
For all the mountains of data and technology surging through every aspect of our lives — business transactions, government services, staying connected with people, and getting our news — there lacks the trust, belief, and authenticity that we need to feel safe. In the long run, this is not good for businesses, which rely on trust relationships with their customers and partners to transact. It’s not good for democratic governments and their citizens, which rely on public transparency and verifiable information for accountability. It’s also not good for the freedom of individuals, who feel their privacy and control eroding day by day by the actions of data-hungry corporations and overreaching government programs.
To do its part to redress this issue, Spruce is reimagining trusted interactions for enterprises and governments — the stewards of the most foundational and impactful layers of infrastructure shaping our lives. We believe that in any organization you can find people who wish public and private institutions respected an individual’s control over their own information and privacy. We are also pragmatists, who understand that these principles are most likely to be implemented at scale when they also make commercial and operational sense. We firmly believe that there are paths striking a balance that both respects individual liberty and allows for enterprise success.
We are creating open-source software products that help our customers go from untrusted data to verifiable information that can be shared privately and with consent. Our products enable complete lifecycle management for licenses, certificates, audit reports, registrations, and other mission-critical data that must remain secure while passing many hands. Our main workflows allow end-users to manage their own data, and for everyone else to have confidence in the consent and purpose of data shared by them. To achieve this, we will utilize a cadre of emerging data technologies, including the recent W3C Verifiable Credentials and W3C Decentralized Identifiers specifications, which have been designed to solve business problems while leaving ample room to champion the end user’s control within a data supply chain.
To best serve our customers, we will meet them where they are today by understanding how they must serve their own customers and internal stakeholders. We will, therefore, focus heavily on creating first-class support to link with existing identity and data appliances commonly found in enterprise environments, including identity servers, internal resource APIs, key management systems, ERPs, and cloud services. As an example, we know that for some organizations, critical infrastructure cannot be directly migrated to new publicly-downloadable mobile applications, and their existing X.509 and SAML-based workflows are extremely relevant and not going anywhere. Any new additions should acknowledge the prior work and build upon it where possible to prevent confusion. We favor approaches that tie in rather than replace, and incrementally demonstrate stability and value prior to increasing the deployment surface area.
With each new deployment of our products, we contribute to the increased adoption of privacy-enhanced protocols and practices that lay the groundwork for a more resilient future infrastructure through solid business cases. We will drive impact that increases decentralization and user control at the level that matters most, while making our customers profits and delighting their risk managers.
If you are interested in working together or hearing more about our approach, please reach out. We are also hiring programmers who love technology and are committed to intellectual honesty, user privacy, and principled experimentation.
