Dashlane came to life in 2011 as a somewhat stealthy startup out of Paris that promised a smart approach to the sometimes-frustrating art of consumers managing multiple passwords. Nearly three years on, with some key product iterations under its belt, the company is announcing a couple of milestones: 2 million consumers using its products for some $1 billion in e-commerce transactions; and a Series B of $22 million — the biggest-ever funding round for an identity management startup, the company says.
The funding is led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation also from existing investors Rho Ventures and FirstMark Capital, as well Bernard Liautaud, the original founder of the company, who is something of a legend in the tech world. He is currently a general partner at Balderton but in his past had founded Business Objects, the enterprise startup that sold to SAP in 2007 for nearly $7 billion. The round brings Dashlane’s total funding to date to $30 million.
Dashlane taps into a couple of key trends in the technology world. The first is the fact that an increasing amount of our lives and our consumer spending habits are played out online — from basic communications through to purchasing and everything in between. The second is a growing reliance on cloud-based services. The third is a growing concern about online security — something that gets increasingly threatened as more malicious hackers follow the money and steal passwords and other valuable data.
Dashlane’s solution gives users a one-stop shop for securing and managing passwords. The idea is that by consolidating different strings together, you create a strong rope less easily frayed. And by tying that rope to earth, it’s a bit more secure: passwords, credit cards, IDs, notes and other details are stored securely via advanced encryption on a local client. Other features include automatic password generation, a security dashboard for assessing password health, and click-only checkout on every website and every device.
“Dashlane is pioneering a new category of consumer security software; helping people take back control of identity and payments information on the web. As consumers put more of their lives and the lives of their loved ones online, they face greater risk of losing that information to hackers. Dashlane is the best way to securely store passwords, credit cards, and other sensitive information on the web,” noted Alex Ferrara in a statement. Ferrara is a BVP partner who is Dashlane’s board as part of this round.
The funding will be used to hire more people, specifically to move into more products in the identity and management space. Two obvious areas here are to build out further into mobile services and apps with more functionality; and enterprise. Although enterprise is an area that already has a number of active companies very active, from Kaspersky, Password Vault and Liebsoft through to Okta, the trend of consumerization that leads a lot of business users to bring apps and services from their leisure life into their work life could be a boost in Dashlane’s favor if it chose to go that route.
“Our mission has always been to build a simple, universal and secure solution for identity and payments on the web,” CEO Emmanuel Schalit said in a statement. “Hundreds of millions of web users still manually register, login and check out on desktops and mobile devices, and
leave themselves vulnerable to online security threats in the process. Dashlane elegantly solves this problem for consumers, and this new round gives us even more resources to go after this fantastic opportunity.”
Dashlane is available currently on PC, Mac, Android and iOS.
Photo Credit: DaveBleasdale
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