SecureAuth believes more security shouldn’t mean more obstacles. Since 2005, SecureAuth has helped leading companies simplify identity and access management for customers and employees, creating experiences that are as welcoming as they are secure. SecureAuth is redefining authentication for the modern enterprise. Today’s evolving threat landscape demands innovative, adaptive security solutions. As the first-to-market provider of continuous facial authentication, the company goes beyond the initial authentication to deliver ongoing security throughout the entire session. SecureAuth’s mature AI-driven risk engine delivers dynamic (and often invisible) authentication, making enterprises more effective than ever at eliminating threats while ensuring frictionless, secure access for employees and customers. “Welcome to Better Identity.” Pulse 2.0 interviewed SecureAuth CEO Joseph Dhanapal to learn more about the company.
Joseph Dhanapal’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Joseph said:
“I’m a security industry veteran with deep expertise in strategy, technology, and operations, and I take a customer-centric approach to innovation. Throughout my career, I’ve served as an operational strategist, leading business efforts from vision to execution in technology-driven companies. My track record includes driving profitable growth and leading transformation initiatives for Fortune 500 companies as well as private equity-backed firms.
“Before joining SecureAuth, I was Vice President of PingOne Advanced Services at Ping Identity, where I led the go-to-market and operations strategy for Ping’s Advanced Cloud solution. In just three years, I scaled the solution from zero to a significant revenue contributor. Prior to my seven-plus years at Ping Identity, I held senior leadership positions in strategy, operations, IT, and software engineering at companies such as TeleTech, CenturyLink, Qwest, and US West. These experiences gave me firsthand insight into the complexities of identity management technologies from the user’s perspective, which I now apply at SecureAuth to address industry challenges and ensure that our solutions remain both relevant and essential.
“I hold a Master of Engineering from the College of Engineering Guindy at Anna University, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Karunya Institute of Technology at Bharathiar University in India.”
Formation of the Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Joseph shared:
“SecureAuth was founded in 2005 at a time when identity security was fragmented. Every application had its own user identities, login methods, and authentication factors — whether it was a username and password, multi-factor authentication, or another approach. Employees and customers had to juggle multiple credentials, leading to confusion, increased help desk tickets, and poor user experiences. The lack of a seamless authentication process not only frustrated users but also led to productivity loss and security gaps.
“The founders of SecureAuth set out to solve this by creating a solution that provided fast, seamless, and highly secure authentication. That vision drove the company’s direction from the start. Over the years, authentication technology has continued to evolve, with advancements like passkeys from Google, Apple and others. The challenge has been integrating these innovations into identity security while maintaining strong protection. SecureAuth has remained at the forefront of this evolution, continuously adding capabilities that uphold the same core goal — delivering high security without disrupting the user experience.”
Primary Responsibilities
What are your primary responsibilities? Joseph answered:
“As the CEO of SecureAuth since April 2024, my responsibility is to ensure the company operates successfully by serving all of our stakeholders. Our primary stakeholders are the customers who have adopted our technology and are integrating it into their enterprises. These organizations rely on us to provide the highest level of security while delivering a seamless user experience. Secondly, our employees — the people developing these technologies — are essential to our success. We want to stay at the forefront of innovation by fostering an environment where they can refine their skills and continue pushing the boundaries of identity and access management. Lastly, our investors, who have committed resources to this company, should see the maximum benefit from their investment. It’s my role to ensure we continue delivering value across all these groups while driving SecureAuth forward.”
Favorite Memory
What’s your favorite memory working for the company thus far? Joseph reflected:
“One of my most memorable moments was witnessing a team come together almost organically, forming a self-driven unit to deliver results for a customer. We all have a heavy workload and limited time but seeing that kind of seamless teamwork — a choreographed effort across multiple functional groups — is always exciting. In one case, a prospect required a critical feature in our solution to move forward with us. From product management to engineering and quality assurance, our team collaborated directly with the customer, understood their needs, designed, built, tested, and deployed the feature into our multi-tenant cloud SaaS platform — all within six hours, without causing any service disruption. That was a major high point for me and a testament to the agility and dedication of our team.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Joseph surmised:
“When you think about identity and access management (IAM), the fundamental capabilities include single sign-on (SSO) and federation. With these, users log in once and gain access to multiple applications without needing to reauthenticate. We also provide a cloud directory to store user credentials, personalization settings, and other identity-related data. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is another key component. This ensures users verify their identity using multiple factors — what they know (password), what they have (security key), and what they are (biometrics such as facial or fingerprint authentication). SecureAuth offers over 25 authentication factors to provide flexibility in how organizations secure their environments. Where we differentiate ourselves is in how we integrate authentication and authorization. Identity security has two layers: authentication, which confirms you are who you say you are, and authorization, which determines what you can do within a system. Many attacks target authentication, but organizations also need to ensure authorization is properly managed.
“One of our most unique capabilities is continuous facial authentication. Unlike traditional authentication methods, where a user logs in once and remains authenticated indefinitely, our system continuously verifies the user’s presence. If the registered user moves away, the session automatically locks — without requiring manual action. Competitors may use badge tap-ins, but users often forget to tap out, leaving sessions vulnerable. Our approach eliminates this risk by automating the process. Another key feature is fine-grained authorization.
“Organizations can create role-based policies that control access based on user attributes, transaction details, or data sensitivity. For example, in a public company, general employees should only access financial data that has been publicly announced, whereas the CFO team can view confidential pre-release financials. SecureAuth makes it easy to set these policies and enforce strict data governance. Our risk-based authentication takes security further by evaluating ongoing risk signals rather than relying on a single point-in-time check. For example, if a user logs in at the office but later tries to access the system from an unsecured public network, our system can recognize this change and either require additional verification or block access. We analyze over 23 risk signals — including network type, device behavior, and continuous facial authentication — to ensure secure access while maintaining a seamless user experience.
“All of this contributes to a passwordless future. By leveraging facial recognition, behavioral analytics, and other signals, users don’t have to rely on traditional credentials. Our technology also prevents unauthorized actions, such as shoulder surfing, screen captures, and unauthorized downloads. As we continue to innovate, SecureAuth remains focused on pushing the boundaries of IAM security to protect organizations without adding unnecessary friction.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Joseph acknowledged:
“One of the challenges in identity and access management is ensuring that solutions built for workforce authentication scale effectively for customer-facing environments. In workforce settings, a smaller group of users regularly access applications, whereas customer environments can involve massive spikes in simultaneous logins. In our case, some of our customers process hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute. To meet this demand, we’ve optimized our SaaS application to handle 100,000 authorizations per second — even in our base instance — without requiring additional configuration. We can further scale this based on customer needs, ensuring seamless performance regardless of the authentication volume.”
Evolution of the Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Joseph noted:
“From the early days of multi-factor authentication, we have continuously expanded our identity security capabilities. The most recent evolution is our addition of SecureAuth SessionGuardian — a continuous facial authentication technology. This ensures ongoing verification throughout a user’s session, making security seamless and minimally disruptive.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Joseph cited:
“The company has achieved multiple growth milestones. One of the most significant was our acquisition of Acceptto about four years ago, which strengthened our passwordless authentication capabilities. Two years ago, we acquired Cloudentity, enhancing our customer identity and access management solutions. Most recently, we brought SessionGuardian into our portfolio, further advancing our continuous authentication technology. Beyond these acquisitions, we have successfully unified these technologies into a single platform. Customers can now access all our security components through a streamlined experience with built-in integrations, making implementation easier and more efficient.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Joseph highlighted:
“One of our financial services customers relies on Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs) for daily operations. Their previous authentication model required employees to copy and paste token codes between devices, creating unnecessary friction. By implementing SecureAuth, we eliminated this hassle by triangulating user location, device authentication, and system access. This resulted in a seamless, passwordless experience — improving both user efficiency and security.
“Another success story involves a retail customer struggling with legacy authentication technology that couldn’t scale with their growth. They migrated to SecureAuth, and now process over 20 million unique authentications per month. Our solution also enabled an omnichannel experience, ensuring consistency whether customers engage online or in physical stores. Their loyalty program, authentication, and user experience are now unified under a single, secure platform.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Joseph assessed:
“As we see it, we serve two groups when it comes to identity and access management. The first group includes employees, partners, contractors, and consultants who come and go within an enterprise. The second group consists of customers or partners consuming services from the company—these are the buyers of the services. The overall market size is in the billions of dollars, and our customers span the globe across both workforce and customer identity access management.
“In the workforce space, we believe we have a unique offering — SecureAuth is the only provider of continuous facial authentication for employee access to the most secure applications and data. For customer identity access management, we’re continuously pushing the boundaries on scalability and transaction volume. This is critical during high-demand events like open enrollment or major retail events such as Black Friday sales. The challenge is managing these spikes in authentication requests seamlessly, and we are well-positioned to address these needs.”
Differentiation From the Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Joseph affirmed:
“Our differentiation begins with innovation — particularly in continuous facial authentication for workforce identity security. We were one of the earliest companies to implement risk-based authentication, reducing unnecessary MFA requests. Now, we’ve expanded on that foundation by introducing continuous facial authentication, a major step forward in security and usability. For customer identity and access management, especially in business-to-business environments, we provide delegated administration.
“Traditionally, when an enterprise needed to manage access for its employees or customers, they had to submit a helpdesk ticket for every new hire or departing employee. This back-and-forth created delays and inefficiencies. With delegated administration, enterprises can manage their own branding, login experiences, MFA preferences, and user access policies — all in a self-service, automated manner. This eliminates the need for manual support tickets, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining strong security.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Joseph emphasized:
“Our goal is to continue innovating in ways that provide the highest level of security without compromising user experience. For workforce identity, this means driving productivity gains while protecting organizations from threats like phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks. For customer identity management, our focus is on helping enterprises onboard customers quickly and securely, allowing them to build frictionless experiences while maintaining robust security. The key is ensuring that security doesn’t become an obstacle but an enabler of growth and trust.”
Fill in the Blank
Fill in the blank of this sentence: “When customers think of _____, we want them to think of SecureAuth.” Joseph replied:
“When customers think of increasing revenue by attracting more users, we want them to think of SecureAuth as the solution. For workforce identity, when customers think of saving money by improving employee productivity, we want them to think of SecureAuth. Our seamless and user-friendly security approach ensures organizations can maximize efficiency without compromising protection.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Joseph concluded:
“One of the most recent advancements in the industry is the increasing accessibility of Gen AI — generative artificial intelligence. We’re already seeing the benefits firsthand. Most of us have used tools like Copilot or ChatGPT, and we’ve experienced how AI can process large amounts of data and provide quick summaries. However, with AI adoption also come gaps in identity security. One recent example I heard involved a team meeting where a group gathered to discuss a non-confidential/open topic. After a majority of the participants left, a smaller group remained to discuss a confidential subject. However, an AI tool had recorded, summarized, and emailed the entire meeting’s notes to everyone, including details of the confidential discussion. It wasn’t a catastrophic security breach, but it highlighted a growing issue. As AI becomes integrated into daily workflows, these scenarios will become more common, and right now, there aren’t strong identity controls dictating what AI agents can and cannot do on our behalf.
“When AI generates summaries, how do we ensure the level of detail aligns with a user’s access permissions? In traditional application and data access, identity and access management (IAM) ensures users can only access the information they’re authorized to see. But we haven’t yet applied those same principles to AI interactions. We believe SecureAuth has the key components to lead in this area, enabling greater AI adoption while maintaining strict security standards. Our policy controls can prevent AI agents from accessing data that employees themselves are not permitted to view. Additionally, when AI generates responses, we can apply the same access controls to determine how much detail should be included in the summary.
“For example, if a regular employee asks an AI agent, ‘How has my company’s financial performance been in the past?’ the AI should only provide publicly available data — such as the past three quarters’ reported earnings, showing quarter-over-quarter growth. But if a CFO-level employee asks the same question, the AI should recognize their higher level of access and include additional details, such as current-quarter performance trends or projections that aren’t available to the broader employee population. At SecureAuth, we’re working to ensure AI-driven security matches the sophistication of existing IAM systems. We are actively developing prewired solutions that will enable AI tools to provide users with appropriate access levels while safeguarding sensitive data. This is the next evolution in identity security, and we are committed to leading the way.”
