With a mission to get rid of passwords, Transmit Security raised a massive $543m in Series A funding at $2.2bn pre-money valuation, touting it as the largest Series A investment in cybersecurity history and one of the highest valuations for a bootstrapped company.
The round was led by Insight Partners and General Atlantic, with additional investment from Cyberstarts, Geodesic, SYN Ventures, Vintage and Artisanal Ventures.
Transmit Security will use the new funds to expand its reach and investing in key global areas to grow the organisation.
The funding round will help the company to accelerate its mission to help the world go passwordless. Organisations lose millions of dollars every year due to unsafe password-based authentication. Weak passwords account for more than 80% of all data breaches, and the average help desk labor cost to reset a single password stands at more than $70, the firm said.
From onboarding to authentication to smart authorization for both customers and workforce across every channel, Transmit’s technology reduces all forms of identity attrition and saves enterprises costs.
Transmit’s biometric-based authenticator, and passwordless identity and risk management solution has already been adopted by a number of big-name brands including Lowe’s, Santander and UBS. The solution, which currently handles more than 9,000 authentication requests per second, can reduce account resets by 96%, and reduces customer authentication from 1 minute to 2 seconds, it claimed. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and Tel Aviv, Israel, it has a prominent presence in North America.
Commenting on the funding, Transmit Security CEO Mickey Boodaei, who co-founded the company in 2014 said, “By eliminating passwords, businesses can immediately reduce churn and cart abandonment and provide superior security for personal data.”
Passwords are one of the root causes of cyberattacks, Boodaei said, who also co-founded cybersecurity firm Imperva that went public in 2011. He believes that passwords are becoming more complicated by the day. Some are required to be at least 13 characters long and include special characters and digits, which makes them easier to forget or lose track of.
He added, “Our customers, whether they are in the retail, banking, financial, telecommunications or automotive sectors, understand that providing an optimized identity experience is a multimillion-dollar challenge. With this latest round of funding from premier partners, we can significantly expand our reach to help rid the world of passwords.”
Transmit Security isn’t the only company that’s on a mission to kill off the password. Microsoft plans to make Windows 10 password-free and Apple recently previewed Passkeys in iCloud Keychain, a method of passwordless authentication powered by WebAuthn and Face ID and Touch ID.
Other players in the space have also secured funding recently, including Beyond Identity, which raised $75m in 2020 and1Kosmos which secured a $15m Series A in February.
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