DEVOPSdigest

Descope has raised $53M in seed funding and emerged from stealth to launch a frictionless, secure, and developer-friendly authentication and user management platform.

The company was founded in 2022 by a team of serial cybersecurity entrepreneurs that previously founded Demisto, a leader in the Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) space that Palo Alto Networks acquired. Descope enables developers to add authentication, user management, and authorization capabilities to consumer and business applications with a few lines of code. The platform 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 user journeys across the application lifecycle.

“What my founding team and I have learned from years of 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.

- Seamlessly add a variety of passwordless authentication methods to apps such as magic links, biometrics (based on WebAuthn), authenticator apps, and social logins.

- Validate, merge, and manage identities across the user journey.

- Get business apps enterprise-ready with single sign-on (SSO), access control, tenant management, and automated user provisioning.

- Prevent account takeover fraud, session theft, credential stuffing, and bot attacks on login pages.

- Enhance user protection by easily enabling multiple factor authentication (MFA), step-up, or biometric authentication within applications.

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