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We got an exclusive look at the 13-slide pitch deck Stytch, a passwordless startup, used to raise $90 million from Coatue
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- San Francisco-based Stytch has raised a $90 million Series B at a unicorn valuation.
- Founded in 2020, Stytch provides passwordless authentication tools for developers.
- The company’s Series B was raised from New York hedge fund Coatue.
Stytch, an 18-month-old startup that can authenticate users without a password, has raised $90 million at a unicorn valuation.
The San Francisco-based startup, which was founded by two former Plaid engineers, enables developers to offer much simpler sign-up and sign-in tools for customers using an API.
The Series B round was led by New York investor Coatue, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Thrive Capital, and Index Ventures. Stytch will acquire Cotter, a no-code passwordless authentication platform backed by Y Combinator, as part of the fundraise.
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“We both had an ‘aha’ moment when we were working on projects within Plaid to stop people’s account details being stolen and the biggest tech relic was passwords,” Reed McGinley-Stempel, Stytch CEO told Insider.
“They are the highest attack vector because people use the same password across numerous accounts and it’s a big area of drop-off for users having to reset details at password entry. There’s a common adage that there is tension between security and usability but password authentication is the exception, it’s bad security and user experience and we want to change that.”
Stytch now works with around 3,500 developers through its platform who purchase software and are charged on a usage basis. It represents massive growth for the company, which had around 350 developers using the platform when it raised a $30 million Series A in July.
Despite coming from the fintech space, Stytch claims to be “vertically agnostic” meaning its batch of products can be adopted across a variety of use cases. In lieu of passwords, users could be offered email magic links, SMS and WhatsApp passcodes, OAuth connections, one-click user invitations, and embeddable magic links. Stytch will also look to offer more biometric options to developers going forward.
“We’re certainly a young company and in the last few quarters our growth has exceeded our expectations,” McGinley-Stempel added. “We hadn’t touched our Series A and had no intent to fundraise but Coatue intimated to us that they were becoming more and more excited and wanted to lead a round.”
Stytch currently has 27 employees but will look to grow to more than 150 in the next year as it bolsters its product and engineering teams.
Check out Stytch’s pitch deck below:
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