Stytch provides the most powerful identity and access management infrastructure for developers, with built-in fraud and risk prevention, allowing companies to incorporate frictionless authentication options into apps and websites. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Stytch co-founder and CTO Julianna Lamb to learn more about the company.
Julianna Lamb’s Background
What is Julianna Lamb’s background? Lamb said:
“I’m an engineer that loves solving problems for other engineers. I’ve always been interested in startups and started my career at Strava before joining Plaid, where I met my co-founder, Reed. At Plaid, I was an engineer on their backend team, working on projects related to authentication and fraud detection and prevention.”
“At Plaid, we saw firsthand the endless frustration experienced by teams — engineers wasting valuable time building authentication solutions instead of focusing on their own product, and users suffering the pain of clunky authentication experiences.”
“At Plaid, we saw users drop off and lose conversions due to the friction created within the built-in auth. Simultaneously, fraudsters discovered that Plaid was a valuable target for credential stuffing attacks because they made it easy to test stolen passwords against the 10,000 banks we integrated with all at once. We invested a lot of time building a fraud engine to defend against these types of attacks and noticed that they were targeting banks with no 2FA, so we had to build a lot of 2FA in-house.”
“We ended up reverse engineering the tech stack, and it sparked a lot of fodder – instead of passwords, can we add facial recognition or magic links? Will that create less friction? How can we easily integrate these APIs within our tech stack?”
Formation Of Stytch
How did the idea for the company come together? Lamb shared:
“Following my time at Plaid, I moved to a security company and experienced the same road bumps when implementing and deploying authentication, so I called Reed. Knowing we had a shared frustration when using dated authentication methods and weren’t satisfied by IAM auth providers on the market, we started Stytch in June 2020 to address developer challenges with auth and make a commitment to advancing passwordless solutions.”
“As Chief Technical Officer, my approach comes from years in the trenches as a backend engineer and product manager. I’m particularly passionate about the innovative value behind a strong engineering culture while ensuring our developer and product teams have the right tools they need to solve problems. As co-founders, Reed and I are passionate about collaborating with each other and our teams to drive big-picture ideas into real products.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Lamb reflected:
“Our beta launch is still one of my top memories because we got to see people sign up and use our product for the first time. When you’ve worked on a product for so long, it’s so validating to see it working in the ways we hoped it would.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Lamb explained:
“Stytch’s core products can be broken into three focus areas – B2B, Consumer Authentication, and Fraud & Risk.”
“Our B2B SaaS offerings empower developers in building authentication into any stack or code base, so you can tailor it to fit your unique requirements and end user experience. Our B2B product enables you to address the auth and identity management needs of organization-based applications and multi-tenancy.’
“The Consumer Auth platform makes it easy for developers to build authentication into any stack or code base, so they can tailor it to fit their unique requirements and end-user experience.”
“Our approach to Fraud & Risk offers two forms of bot detection and prevention. Device fingerprinting is a fully passive approach that requires no user friction and therefore is recommended for all use cases where you’re looking to prevent bot activity on your site.”
“As we crafted our product offerings for developers, they’re equipped with advanced features like device fingerprinting and account takeover-resistant authentication. The Stytch platform also provides the infrastructure to make a company’s identity and access management secure, reliable, and scalable.”
“Stytch offers a full suite of authentication options – ranging from passwordless options to Single Sign On (SSO) to Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – that enable developers to meet all of their authentication needs both today and in the future.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Lamb and the team faced in building the company? Lamb acknowledged:
“I think the biggest challenge has been rethinking my role at different stages of company growth. When we first started, there wasn’t much difference between me and any other engineer because there were so few of us. But in just four years, we’ve scaled to a company of over 70 people – what’s required of a CTO at this point has almost nothing to do with actual coding and a lot more to do with finding the right people, effectively fostering the kind of culture you want for your team, and creating an engineering culture in which both the people and the product really thrive.”
Evolution Of Stytch’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Lamb noted:
“So much. When we started, we were laser-focused on passwordless authentication. We’re now a comprehensive IAM and fraud prevention platform. We’ve made a few big step-changes to the value we bring:
1.) Bridge to passwordless: While we still believe passwordless is the future, we also recognize a lot of companies’ customers may not be ready to make that leap just yet, so they need an auth partner that can provide them with a more secure version of passwords alongside a suite of passwordless solutions that they can start to introduce as it makes sense for their use case.
2.) Elevating B2B / SSO: When it came time to build our B2B solution, we wanted to do one better than checking the boxes: we wanted to drastically cut TTV for devs. We did this by being the only auth solution on the market to offer a multi-tenant architecture. Even though B2B authentication requires a separate architecture from B2C, most auth providers just try to tack multi-tenant features onto a user-based architecture. This inevitably means additional dev time and customization to make it truly functional for a B2B use case. We released our offering in the spring of 2023 and just released a suite of updates that make it the best enterprise-ready B2B solution out there. Alongside our fraud prevention tools, B2B is now our most popular solution because it saves developers from some of the most common footguns and headaches of customizing B2B auth yourself.
3.) Fraud protection: We’re really proud to offer fraud protection alongside our auth suite. Our device fingerprinting solution consistently wins bake-offs against legacy providers like Arkose and FingerprintJS, and allows very fine-grained customization so each customer can tweak it to their use case. With the rise of AI, we find our DFP solution works equally well for companies protecting themselves against AI-driven fraud, but also protects AI companies’ endpoints from compute resource abuse. With the rapid step-changes happening in AI, we know fraud prevention is going to become table stakes for every company’s auth in the future. If you’re serious about protecting your customers, you need both fraud and auth.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Lamb cited:
“There have been so many milestones in the last four years. Our first public launch in July 2021 was certainly a significant one and quickly followed by securing $90 million in Series B funding just a few months later. The next really huge milestone for us was in May of 2023 when we launched our B2B suite – I’m particularly proud of this one because we didn’t just try to check a box, we really tried to build a new kind of B2B authentication from the ground up, the way we thought it should’ve been done from the beginning.”
“We’ve seen this effort pay off with customers, who consistently tell us how much time and strife we eliminate for them. Most recently, in December of last year, we launched our Passkeys offering to propel passwordless adoption. And we’ve got some exciting products in the pipeline that we’ll be announcing later this year.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Lamb about customer success stories, she highlighted:
- Replit: Device fingerprinting for one of our favorite AI-powered developer tools.
- Tome: A zero-downtime migration from Auth0 of millions of users, while upleveling their fraud detection with our device fingerprinting solution.
- Orb: Migrated from Auth0 in 1 week, all while improving reliability and performance.
Funding
When asking Lamb about the company’s funding, she revealed:
“From 2023 to 2024, we increased revenue fivefold year-over-year, and we’ve raised $126 million in funding to date.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Lamb assessed:
“The CIAM market is enormous and is estimated to grow to more than $50 billion by 2032, expanding at a CAGR of 16.7% from 2024-2032. Our focus is making sure we have a developer-friendly solution that creates frictionless solutions for every user and application.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Lamb affirmed:
“Unlike competitors, our approach is API-first and developer-friendly.”
“Stytch offers more flexibility for developers than any other auth platform, with options that range from complete frontend SDKs with reusable UI or can be used for headless implementation to backend SDKs and APIs that allow full customizability.”
“Also offering unique B2B and B2C products, each with optimized APIs/SDKs, data models, and features to save developers valuable time. In addition to advanced security features like Device Fingerprinting, we uniquely layered it with authentication to protect against bots and fraud.”
“Compared to market competitors – Google Firebase, AWS Cognito, and Auth0 – Stytch provides more advanced authentication methods, maximum flexibility with backend stacks, and more hands-on support.”
“Companies are now moving tens of millions of users from legacy infrastructure to Stytch as the leading alternative because of our precise developer tools that enable them to build faster and more modern authentication and authorization offerings, plus next-gen fraud prevention.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Lamb concluded:
“As fraud and abuse on the internet continues to rise, Stytch hopes to help keep the internet honest. We think that authentication and fraud detection and prevention are tightly intertwined, and so solving the next generation of identity and access management challenges requires tackling both.”
