- Early world wide web pioneers Jim Clark and Thomas Jermoluk have launched Beyond Identity with $30 million in funding
Early world wide web pioneers Jim Clark and Thomas Jermoluk (“TJ”) have partnered to fix problems associated with passwords. Between Clark and Jermoluk, they have led some of the most iconic Internet companies like Netscape, Silicon Graphics, and @Home Network. Now they have launched Beyond Identity with $30 million in Series A funding co-led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, LLC (KDT) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
Beyond Identity is known for delivering a secure solution (based on industry-standard certificate chains) for password-less identity management — which requires no changes to security infrastructures and completely removes login friction for end-users. Plus it provides consumers with a much more secure alternative to password managers.
In another release, the company also announced the availability of its groundbreaking cloud-native passwordless identity management platform in the release Beyond Identity Delivers the End of Passwords.
KDT is the corporate venture capital arm of Koch Industries, which is one of the largest privately-held companies in America with more than $110 billion in annual revenues. And NEA — which was founded in 1977 — is one of the world’s largest and most active venture capital firms with over $23 billion in committed capital. Both of the companies are also early customers of Beyond Identity.
According to the Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report, 80% of hacking-related breaches still involve compromised and weak credentials. And multiple analyst firms tracking the market to defend against these attacks size the identity and access management (IAM) market in excess of $20 billion and growing at a rapid pace. While there are solutions like password manages and multi-factor authentication (MFA), it does not solve the core issue since it creates additional steps and complexity for users.
“Innovation should disrupt markets, not businesses. Disruptive innovation needs to advance security without introducing friction or complexity,” said Forest Baskett, General Partner at NEA. “Netscape ‘accidentally’ created markets in access and authentication for aspects of identity that weren’t addressed at the time. By going back to fundamentals and extending the Chain of Trust, Jim, TJ, and team have created a truly disruptive innovation that advances both security and usability equally.”
Clark is known for launching Netscape with Marc Andreessen and building what would the market-leading Netscape Navigator browser and SSL (the precursor to Transport Layer Security). And Clark also founded Healtheon, which merged with WebMD. Plus he was the original investor and Chairman of digital photo sharing and storage website Shutterfly.
As a Bell Labs Engineer, TJ served as the CEO of At Home Corporation (@Home Network and Excite@Home) where he was responsible for the massive growth and cable partnerships that created the world’s largest broadband footprint of its time. And he also served as Silicon Graphics President and COO in its early days and personally designed and led teams that created many of Silicon Graphics’ breakthrough products.
Beyond Identity’s solution utilizes existing secure communications infrastructure and crypto standards to extend the trust boundary beyond server-to-server communications to include users and their devices. And by doing so, it completely removes the need for “shared secret” password-based authentication approaches, and dependence on friction-laden compensating controls.
“For too long we’ve pushed the burden of trust to centralized aggregation points – from enterprise directories to cloud services to website servers – each with varying levels of trustworthiness and a massively broad set of security postures and platforms,” explained Clark. “While rational, it created more centralized risk and attractive targets, which attackers feasted on. New devices with biometrics and secure enclaves have given us a much stronger level of security that allows us to establish trust in, and with, each user. By decentralizing to the perimeter, it supports the principles of Zero Trust and destroys attacker economics.”
The cloud-native platform provides a secure method of authenticating users and devices without passwords by using the same secure and scalable approach: X.509 certificates and TLS protocol. This technology is already universally deployed and underpins billions of dollars in online transactions annually.
The solution creates a Chain of Trust that includes user and device identity and a real-time snapshot of a device’s security posture, all in an immutable package that is signed by a provably secure certificate. Initially, the Beyond Identity is targeting at businesses with an acute need to dramatically improve workforce and customer authentication and eliminate the risk of central password databases. And Beyond Identity will also target individual consumers who hate passwords, struggle with password vault usability and security, and don’t trust the “login with” solutions offered by companies who monetize user data.
Now Beyond Identity’s board of directors will expand from Clark (Chairman) and TJ (CEO) to include Forest Baskett, Byron Knight, and Hilarie Koplow-McAdams.
Before joining NEA, Baskett was Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer at Silicon Graphics. And Baskett also founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation.
Knight is the Managing Director at KDT. Before joining KDT, Knight was Vice President of eCommerce at Georgia-Pacific. Knight started his career at TechDiscovery (acquired by Harvey Nash).
Koplow-McAdams workedas President at New Relic as well as at Salesforce. She had started her career at Oracle Corporation where she held a variety of roles over the course of 18 years, including Senior Vice President of Oracle Direct. Currently, Koplow-McAdams serves on the board of directors of BloomReach, DataRobot, HackerOne, Knotch, Zendesk Corporation, and several other companies.
