With password stability giving way to passwordless, Descope raises $53M

Password security is not simple. Expecting consumers to make exceptional 12-digit passwords with a blend of upper and lowercase letters and exclusive characters for dozens of applications is not scalable. Nevertheless several companies are reliant on passwords to manage consumer accessibility, which sales opportunities to info breaches like people experienced by PayPal. 

As a outcome, numerous providers are searching toward passwordless authentication to detect users in a way that is resistant to credential theft.  

One particular these types of vendor is authentication and user management seller Descope, which today emerged from stealth and introduced a $53 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Enterprise Companions and GGCV Cash. The company’s authentication platform enables developers to develop no-code authentication flows by using drag-and-fall. 

Additional broadly, the seed funding highlights the desire for passwordless ways to cybersecurity to defend versus phishing and social engineering threats. 

Why password security is shifting to passwordless  

For years passwords have introduced significant hazard to enterprises. According to the Verizon 2022 Details Breach Investigations Report, virtually 50% of info breaches involve the use of stolen credentials. 

This popular exploitation of credentials has led to extra and more desire in passwordless authentication. Companies which includes Google, Microsoft and Apple have tried to develop options under the FIDO alliance’s eyesight of a prevalent passwordless signal-in normal.  

“Passwords are undesirable for both safety and usability,” said Slavik Markovich, cofounder and CEO of Descope. “They are the major cause of protection breaches and the most frequent entry position for cybercriminals to obtain their ambitions. Passwords also result in friction all through the consumer journey, foremost to churn and a damaging consumer knowledge.”

He included that, “recent developments this sort of as FIDO2, WebAuthn, and passkeys have established the stage for a passwordless long term. But this long run will genuinely be attainable only when application developers have the tools and means to easily add passwordless authentication approaches to their apps.”

Descope is wanting to add to this “passwordless future” by earning it a lot easier for builders to implement passwordless authentication as part of their have apps or solutions. Following all, it’s complicated and time-consuming for enhancement groups to build these components from scratch. 

As an alternative, Descope permits customers to build authentication flows by using a drag-and-drop workflow editor. These no-code workflows empower builders to employ person accessibility controls and get applications to market more quickly, without having compromising on security. 

The passwordless authentication market 

Researchers anticipate that the passwordless authentication market will expand from $6.6 billion in 2022 to $21.2 billion by 2027 as a lot more corporations appear to shield them selves from social engineering, phishing and other types of credential theft. 

A person of Descope’s most important opponents is Stytch, a resource enabling developers to construct authentication flows through an API as properly as JavaScript and Cell SDKs. In November 2021, Stytch raised $90 million in sequence B funding and accomplished a valuation of $1 billion. 

Yet another significant seller in the industry is Auth0, a Buyer Identification Obtain Management (CIAM) vendor that permits organizations to define entry roles for application and API finish-end users to implement dynamic entry controls. Okta acquired Auth0 for $6.5 billion in 2021. 

According to Markovich, the critical differentiator involving Descope and other providers is its use of workflows. “These no-code workflows summary absent the complexity of developing authentication although continue to providing application builders control above their UX and UI,” he explained.