Highlights

  • The firm also launched a business version, which integrates with several other work platforms.
  • This round of funding was led by Iconiq Growth, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tiger Global, Accel, and Backbone Angels.

1Password, a Toronto-headquartered password management app, revealed that it has raised USD620 million in a Series C round of funding that valued it at USD 6.8 billion.

In today’s times, it has been crucial for individuals and companies to remember and protect passwords. An average person today has dozens of different passwords for various apps and accounts. A majority of the password requires to contain a combination of letters, numbers and symbols.

Starting as a consumer password management app, 1Password started to build a product for businesses in 2015 that allows passwords to be securely shared and managed across teams. The firm also launched a business version, which integrates with several other work platforms. According to 1Password CED Jeff Shiner, its platform is now being used by over 100,000 companies, including the likes of Slack and IBM.

Growth story

This round of funding was led by Iconiq Growth, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tiger Global, Accel, and Backbone Angels. At the end of 2019, 1Password raised a USD 200 million series A round led by Facebook and Spotify investor Accel Partners. It had also raised USD 100 million in the series B round in July 2021 at a USD 2 billion valuation. The revenues for 2021 are expected to reach around USD 150 million, according to Shiner.

The 16-year-old company plans to utilize the funds to improve its products and hire more staff to compete with its competitors, LastPass and NordPass. It plans to triple its engineering and customer support teams, to build out its business-focused Events API functionality that provides visibility into successful and failed sign-in attempts, and to finance more acquisitions. Employee strength, too, has increased from 475 to 570 employees.

According to the company, around 80% of the office workers and security experts felt burnt out due to the pandemic. Around 12% of them resorted to using the same password for everything; only a few changed their passwords for everything at work.

Expert view

“We’ve found that when you have stress and burnout, two things happen,” 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner tells TechCrunch. “Firstly, people look for the easy way — when you’re overworked, you’re going to put security on the back-burner. The other side effect of stress and burnout has been a desire to change, and you see that in the Great Resignation. That leads to security issues because all those apps and services that IT are not aware of you’re now taking with you.”

“We’re looking at strategic acquisitions,” said Shiner. “We made an acquisition last year with Secret Hub, and we will continue to look at acquisitions and how those can help us achieve our mission and goals.”

The funding will “give us the sleep-at-night ability to go after some of the big bets that we need to take,” said Shiner.