Authentication startup Descope launches from stealth with $53m seed funding to trailblaze a passwordless future for all

Descope announced it has raised $53 million in seed funding and emerged from stealth to launch a frictionless, secure, and developer-friendly authentication and user management platform.

The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and GGV Capital, with participation from Unusual Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Cerca Partners, Tech Aviv, J Ventures, and Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI). The round also includes notable individual investors including George Kurtz (Co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike), John W. Thompson (Lead Independent Director at Microsoft), Bipul Sinha (Co-founder and CEO of Rubrik), and Assaf Rappaport (Co-founder and CEO of Wiz). 

Descope was founded in 2022 by a team of serial cybersecurity entrepreneurs that previously founded Demisto, a leader in the Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) space that Palo Alto Networks acquired. 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 it easier to deploy, maintain, and update user journeys across the application lifecycle.

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 important for organizations to refocus their development efforts to core initiatives that will move the needle for business. Passwordless authentication offers a solution, but only if application developers have the tools and resources to apply it. By outsourcing authentication and user management, organizations are able to improve user adoption and conversion, accelerate time to market, reduce login fraud, and save developer time.

Slavik Markovich, Co-founder and CEO, Descope: ''What my founding team and I have learned from years of experience is that authentication is never finished for any application. We have built authentication and user management in-house for both business and consumer apps in our past lives. Every time, what started out as a sprint line item turned into 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 uniquely allows organizations to:

• Create authentication flows and user-facing screens using a visual workflow designer.
• Seamlessly add a variety of passwordless authentication methods to apps such as magic links, biometrics (based on WebAuthn), authenticator apps, and social logins.
• Validate, merge, and manage identities across the user journey.
• Get business apps enterprise-ready with single sign-on (SSO), access control, tenant management, and automated user provisioning.
• Prevent account takeover fraud, session theft, credential stuffing, and bot attacks on login pages.
• Enhance user protection by easily enabling multiple factor authentication (MFA), step-up, or biometric authentication within applications. 

Guru Chahal, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners: ''Authentication is too important to be done incorrectly, but it’s also too complicated and time-consuming to be done in-house by engineering teams. 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.''

Oren Yunger, Partner, GGV Capital: "We are now watching the final act of the password. The customer experience and app security of the future do not include typing in a 12-digit combo that can be easily breached. Innovators like Descope power this huge paradigm shift of going passwordless. Descope's passwordless technology stack balances the needs of the developers for convenience, organizations for security, and end-users for a smooth experience. GGV looks forward to supporting the Descope team as it takes passwords out of the equation."

www.descope.com