Announcing our $30 Million Series A to make passwords a thing of the past

We are thrilled to announce Stytch has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Thrive, with participation from Coatue and existing investors, Benchmark and Index. We’re also proud to welcome Thrive’s Gaurav Ahuja to our board of directors, who is joining alongside Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta. Additionally, we're bringing onboard new angel investors including Matthew Prince, Cassidy Williams, Neha Narkhede, and Joshua Browder.

When we were at Plaid, we witnessed the shortcomings of passwords first-hand, both from a security and usability perspective. We saw how often users gave up when the authentication process was too hard and, for all the friction passwords introduce, they still leave users vulnerable to account takeover attacks.

User experience and security have both evolved over the past few decades, but authentication is stuck in the 1990s despite underpinning all of our online interactions.

That’s why Stytch was born - to make the next generation of authentication passwordless.

We believe in building tools and infrastructure that make it easier, faster, and safer to build authentication into apps and websites. We’re making it easy to modernize your authentication flows and build great user experiences by adopting passwordless technologies.

The traditional approach to authentication ignores the significant downsides of passwords. 65 percent of users reuse passwords across different accounts, posing a significant security threat and creating larger breach liabilities. At the same time, we're constantly forgetting and resetting them. When users forget their password, about 75 percent give up and don’t complete the reset process. Similarly concerning, 45 percent of users report password authentication “frequently” or “very frequently” prevents them from completing an online transaction, costing businesses money and users.

Over the past several years, there has been a rise in alternative authentication methods, using advances in both hardware (e.g. biometrics, YubiKey) and software (e.g. APIs for programmatic text + email), which have paved the way for a passwordless future. But building a robust new system for authentication is no small undertaking – companies would need to dedicate entire teams to solving this problem themselves. We see this as a massive opportunity to help developers move to a new era of authentication where they can embed passwordless authentication methods through simple APIs and SDKs

At Stytch, we’re building the platform that we wish we had in past roles and making it available to anyone.

Today, we have more than 350 developers building on the Stytch platform adding email magic links, SMS and WhatsApp passcodes, and one-click user invitations into their user onboarding and login flows. In addition to these core passwordless features, we’ve seen companies of all sizes drawn to the simple developer experience and the flexibility offered by our API-first approach, including a handful of fortune 500 companies that are using the product.

But we’re just getting started. With the new funding, we’re working on adding numerous new authentication options like mobile biometrics, WebAuthn, OAuth logins, QR codes, and push notification login to the platform. We’re also expanding the user infrastructure features that make Stytch the simplest and lowest friction way to onboard and engage users, building out session management, account recovery, and more advanced fraud detection.

The future of authentication is here, and you can get up and running with Stytch today. Sound like something you want to also get behind? We’re looking for more great people, so check out our open positions.

Julianna and Reed