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Capital might be harder to come by than it once was in startup land, but some firms are bucking the trend \u2014 hard. Take Descope<\/a>, for example, which today announced that it raised a whopping $53 million in seed funding for its \u201cdeveloper-first\u201d authentication and user management platform.<\/p>\n The money came from Lightspeed Venture Partners and GGV Capital with additional funds contributed by Dell Technologies Capital, TechAviv, J Ventures, Cerca, Unusual Ventures, Silicon Valley CISO Investments and individual investors CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz and Microsoft chairman John W. Thompson. It\u2019ll be used, Descope co-founder and CEO Slavik Markovich says, to grow Descope\u2019s product capabilities, invest in research and support open source initiatives around authentication, authorization and user management.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Descope platform helps developers add authentication, user management and authorization capabilities to their business-to-consumer and business-to-business apps with just a few lines of code,\u201d Markovich told TechCrunch in an email interview. \u201cIt helps apps accelerate their time to market, increase the efficiency of their engineering resources, reduce user friction and prevent a wide variety of identity-based cyberattacks.\u201d<\/p>\n Why the large cash infusion \u2014 particularly large for a seed round \u2014 in a dev-focused startup, you might ask? Markovich says that it came down to timing. In tight economies, organizations feel the pressure to shift software development efforts to initiatives that\u2019ll move the needle for business. Descope enables them to achieve this, Markovich avers, by outsourcing many necessary \u2014 but not revenue-generating \u2014 authentication and user management app components, freeing up dev teams.<\/p>\n Descope was founded last April by the members of the core team that built the security operations platform Demisto, which Palo Alto Networks acquired<\/a> in March 2019. While at Demisto, the team says that they experienced the pain of building authentication and user management functionality \u2014 including password management, single sign-on, tenant management and roles and permissions \u2014 firsthand. It turned into a multiyear investment, Markovich says \u2014 not to mention a massive time sink.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Descope, the team\u2019s vision is to \u2018descope\u2019 (hence the name) authentication and user management from every app developer\u2019s daily work, so that they can focus on business-critical initiatives without worrying about building, updating and maintaining authentication,\u201d Markovich said.<\/p>\n Markovich doesn\u2019t deny that there\u2019s a wealth of competition in the user authentication space, like ConductorOne<\/a>, Stytch<\/a>, Transmit Security<\/a> and Okta-backed Auth0<\/a>. (In 2021, VC investment in identity management startups reached<\/a> $3.2 billion, according to Crunchbase \u2014 a record at the time.) But he asserts that Descope is differentiated by its workflow and screen editor, which are drag-and-drop as opposed to code-based and intended to let developers customize authentication flows for apps without having to write any code.<\/p>\n \u201cThis greatly speeds up time to market and also makes it easier to modify and update user journeys flows with time,\u201d Markovich said. \u201cThese no-code workflows abstract away the complexity of building authentication while still giving app builders control over their user experience and user interface.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond the editors, Descope offers a set of software development kits and APIs that allow customers to add passwordless authentication methods (think biometrics, risk-based authentication and multifactor authentication) to existing apps and services. Security teams get app security flows that they can review and audit for compliance.<\/p>\n So why launch Descope now? There\u2019s no shortage of rival apps, after all. But Markovich says that the team felt the industry had reached an inflection point. Over 66% of smartphone users are expected to use device-native biometrics instead of passwords by 2024, he noted, citing data<\/a> from Mercator, while authentication protocols like FIDO2, WebAuthn and passkeys have set the foundation for a passwordless future. The next step, Markovich argues, is enabling developers to easily add passwordless authentication methods alongside others such as social logins, one-time passwords and magic links to their apps.<\/p>\n