Descope raises $53 million in seed money to find something better than passwords
Israeli startup Descope announced it has raised $53 million in seed funding and emerged from stealth to launch a frictionless, secure, and developer-friendly authentication platform.
Founded in 2022 by a team of serial cybersecurity entrepreneurs, Descope 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 deploying, maintaining, and updating user journeys across the application lifecycle easier.
Passwords are not only the leading cause of security breaches but are also known to cause friction throughout a user journey, leading to churn and a negative experience for end customers.
Beyond security and usability, in tight economies, it becomes increasingly essential for organizations to refocus their development efforts to core initiatives that will move the needle for the business. Password authentication offers a solution, but only if application developers have the tools and resources to apply it. By outsourcing authentication and user management, organizations can improve user adoption and conversion, accelerate time to market, reduce login fraud, and save developer time.
“What my founding team and I have learned from years of experience is that authentication is never finished for any application,” said Slavik Markovich, Co-Founder, and CEO of Descope. “We have built authentication and user management in-house for business and consumer apps in our past lives.
“Every time, what started as a sprint line item became a multi-year investment, taking our focus away from what we were meant to do. Our vision is to “de-scope” authentication from every app developer’s daily work, so they can focus on business-critical initiatives without worrying about building, maintaining, or updating authentication.”
Descope’s authentication and user management platform aims to make building passwordless authentication easy and intuitive. Descope allows organizations to create authentication flows and user-facing screens using a visual workflow designer; add a variety of passwordless authentication methods to apps such as magic links, biometrics, authenticator apps, and social logins; validate, merge, and manage identities across the user journey; prevent account takeover fraud; and more.
"Eighty percent of the attacks or compromises we see involve some form of identity or credential theft," said George Kurtz, Co-Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. "With the rapidly changing nature of modern application development, builders must care deeply about safeguarding identity and limiting authentication vulnerabilities. Descope is taking a unique approach to identity and raising the bar for cyber adversaries with their solution."