Descope Launches Authentication, User Management Platform

Descope has raised $53 million in seed funding and emerged from stealth to launch a frictionless, secure and developer-friendly authentication platform. Descope enables developers to add authentication, user management and authorization capabilities to consumer and business applications with a few lines of code. Founded in 2022 by a team of cybersecurity experts, Descope 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 the user journeys across the application lifecycle.

Passwords are not only the leading cause of security breaches but they are also known to cause friction throughout a user’s journey, leading to churn and a negative experience for end customers. Beyond security and usability, in tight economies, it becomes important for organizations to refocus their development efforts to core initiatives that will move the needle for the 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 can improve user adoption and conversion, accelerate time to market, reduce login fraud and save developer time.

“What my founding team and I have learned from years of lived experience is that authentication is never finished for any application,” said Slavik Markovich, co-founder and CEO of Descope. “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 allows organizations to:

  • Create authentication flows and user-facing screens using a visual workflow designer.
  • Add a variety of passwordless authentication methods to apps such as magic links, biometrics (WebAuthn), authenticator apps, and social logins.
  • Validate and manage identities across the user journey, including merging identities across different authentication methods.
  • Get business apps enterprise-ready with single sign-on (SSO), access control, tenant management and automated user provisioning.
  • Prevent attackers from breaking authentication through session theft, credential stuffing, bot attacks, and other types of password compromise.
  • Ensure risk reduction by enabling multiple factor authentication (MFA), step-up, or biometric authentication within applications.
  • Manage access keys for machine-to-machine authentication.

Descope raised $53 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and GGV Capital, with participation from Unusual Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Cerca, 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 (Chairman of the Board at Microsoft), Bipul Sinha (Co-Founder and CEO of Rubrik), and Assaf Rappaport (Co-Founder and CEO of Wiz).

The Descope platform is available for B2C and B2B applications. Developers can use the platform without charge for up to 7,500 monthly active users for B2C apps and for up to 50 tenants for B2B apps. For more information, visit https://www.descope.com/