Bellevue-based Auth0 announced today that it has raised $6.9 million in funding. The startup provides a way for developers to easily set up authentication and identity verification for logins and enterprise solutions.
The new round of funding adds to the $2.4 million raised last year, bringing Auth0’s total funding to $9.3 million. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from K9 Ventures and others.
Auth0 combines the wealth of existing login and identity verification options into a few lines of code that developers can quickly add to their application. By sustaining security functions, updating APIs and other backend tasks, Auth0 is designed to simplify maintenance for developers.
The company was founded two years ago in a “fit of white-hot rage,” according to CEO Jon Gelsey. Co-founder and CTO Matías Woloski was frustrated by how much time it was taking to set up authentication and decided to create a company to solve that problem for developers.
Much like Twilio, Auth0 uses the cloud to let developers worry about their application, not the backend of connecting users to a service.
“Identity [verification] is a pain to implement,” Gelsey said. “It can take a long time to get it right. It’s easy to do it wrong and leave vulnerabilities open. And we make it really easy.”
Developers can use Auth0 for a range of identity verification, from building an online profile to accessing internal documents on company servers. Developers can use a combination of social identities (like the “Login with Facebook” buttons) and user databases (the more traditional username and password login).
Auth0 also supports many enterprise authentication protocols, which can be “orders of magnitude more complex” to implement, according to Gelsey. Auth0’s biggest competitors are the individual developers who build out login and verification systems themselves.
“If you were to write [an identity verification system] yourself, it could take weeks or months,” Gelsey said. “The identity world is large, complex and confusing, even for very sophisticated developers. We make it very simple. We take all that away. You integrate in Auth0 and authentication is something we handle automatically for you.”
Gelsey said that Auth0 not only eliminates setup time, but also saves time on maintenance down the road. The service is subscription based and prices scale with the number of active users.
With this new round of funding, Auth0 plans to hire new employees and spread the word about its services by putting more money into sales and marketing. Last year, the startup hired Microsoft veteran Gianpaolo Carraro as vice president of sales and marketing. Right now, Auth0 has 41 employees and handles identity verification and logins for more than 20,000 companies in 150 countries.
