Alejandro Arrieche
It is a time of change for the tech industry as several trends are progressively disrupting legacy protocols and well-established platforms. Two good examples are artificial intelligence changing the web browsing and search industry and ad-supported subscriptions growing rapidly in the streaming space.
Meanwhile, changes are also occurring in one of the most traditional corners of the online realm associated with how users access their accounts. Passwords have dominated the user management and IT security space for decades despite the hundreds of system breaches that occur every year.
Also read: Best Cybersecurity Stocks to Invest in by Performance
Many entrepreneurs have noticed that technology has evolved to the point that it might be time for a change in this particular field and this has paved the way for the introduction of biometrics-centered access and passkeys.
What is Descope and How it Managed to Raise that Much Capital?
One startup appears to have attracted significant interest from investors as it managed to raise $53 million during its seed round – a stage of development in which only a prototype-level product may have been presented.
The name of this company is Descope and it was founded by some of the people responsible for creating the core product of Demisto – a cybersecurity firm that was acquired by Palo Alto networks in 2019 for $560 million.
This first funding round of Descope was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and GGV Capital but other large companies and prominent individuals from the tech space also participated including Dell Technologies and the Chief Executive Officer of Crowdstrike, George Kurtz.
In a press release published today, Descope described itself as a solution that “enables developers to add authentication, user management, and authorization capabilities to consumer and business applications with a few lines of code”.
“The platform offers different integration flavors based on developer preferences – from no/low code to well documented SDKs and APIs – to make it easier to deploy, maintain, and update user journeys across the application lifecycle”, the statement further reads.
The fact that Descope is bringing in so much money from investors at a point when macroeconomic conditions are harsh could be an indication that its product could be poised to become a powerful force in the disruptive “passwordless” trend.
“Descope’s founding team is full of serial entrepreneurs whose superpower is actively listening to users and solving their problems. The strong response from early customers suggests that Descope is on to a game-changing technology for app developers”, commented Guru Chahal, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in regards to the firm’s prospects.
Passwords Were the Leading Cause of Breaches in 2022
The use of passwords is one of the leading causes of security breaches according to an investigation report published by Verizon last year. The reason for this is that hackers can obtain these access credentials by using different methodologies including social engineering schemes and brute-force software.
The weakness of the password-centered model has been made even clearer with the recent cybersecurity breaches involving password management tools like Norton LifeLock and LastPass, both of which had their systems penetrated by bad actors that reportedly gained access to the personal data of thousands of users and, possibly, to their password vaults.
That said, Descope is not a consumer-facing app. Instead, its target market are developers who would like to incorporate “passwordless authentication” into their software without having to create endless lines of code.
Descope is already available for B2C and B2B applications and developers can freely test it for up to 7,500 monthly active users (B2C) and up to 50 tenants (B2B).
Even though the company is not the first to offer this kind of product, its Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Slavik Markovich, believes that they have come up with a differentiated product as Descope is a drag-and-drop tool that requires nearly no coding to be integrated to any solution that requires a user management layer.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alejandro Arrieche.
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