HYPR, a company that provides a cloud-based passwordless authentication platform, has raised $35 million in a Series C financing, doubling the company’s total funding to more than $70 million.
The company’s multi-factor authentication (MFA) technology helps companies go passwordless by leveraging the convenience of a smartphone with the added security of a smart card.
The company says the additional funding will be used to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and grow its support functions.
“The shift to remote work has propelled passwords to the top of every security organization’s list of priorities. As the sophistication and volume of cyber-attacks grows, we’re seeing unprecedented urgency for a solution to the password problem,” said George Avetisov, HYPR Co-Founder and CEO.
HYPR says its customers include brands such as Norwegian Airlines, Point72, Rakuten, Otis Worldwide, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, CVS Health, Fiserv, and City National Bank.
Headquartered in New York City, HYPR also has teams in Boston, California, London, and Tokyo.
The Series C round was led by Advent International, which joins HYPR’s existing investors including RRE Ventures, .406 Ventures, BoldStart, Top Tier Capital, MESH, Alumni Ventures Group, Allen & Co, Samsung NEXT and Mastercard.
HYPR is one of several recently funded startups looking to provide passwordless authentication solutions. Others include Beyond Identity, which has raised a total of $105 million, Axiad, which raised $20 million in growth funding in January, and Secret Double Octopus, which has raised more than $22 million since being founded in 2015.
According to Jim Ducharme, Vice President of Identity Products at RSA, the future is passwordless. “That’s the inevitable conclusion I think more and more people are reaching as we watch passwordless standards become more firmly established and passwordless authentication methods grow in number and sophistication,” he wrote in a late 2019 SecurityWeek column.
Ducharme also reminds us of the challenges to consider with going passwordless. “For example, how do you prove identity for credentials enrollment in a world that doesn’t use passwords? And how do you recover lost credentials? Perhaps one of the most important considerations is how to address these challenges without recreating some of the very issues that doomed passwords in the first place – like the user inconvenience, help desk burden and costs associated with password resets. We must be vigilant not to simply end up replacing password resets with different, but equally onerous, methods. It’s still too early in the game to know precisely how we’ll address all these issues in a meaningful way. But it’s not too early to start exploring.”
Related: How Do We Get to a Passwordless World? One Step at a Time.
Related: Microsoft Pushing for a Passwordless Windows 10
Related: Silicon Valley Legends Launch Beyond Identity in Quest to Eliminate Passwords
Related: ZenKey: How Major Mobile Carriers Are Teaming Up to Eliminate Passwords
Related: The Human Element and Beyond: Why Static Passwords Aren’t Enough