Auth0 Raises $15 Million In Round Of Venture Capital

Auth0, the Identity-as-a-Service startup, has raised $15 million in a round of venture capital.

According to a report, the venture capital raise was a Series B round and was led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, K9 Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank, all of which have invested in the startup before. With the $15 million, Auth0 has now raised a total of $24 million.

“At the end of the day, we want to make the internet safer,” Jon Gelsey, CEO of the startup, said in the report highlighting the round of venture funding. “The wonderful and terrible thing about identity is that it’s a very complex, heterogeneous and corner case-ridden area.”

According to Gelsey, many websites and mobile app developers that have to integrate with different login systems can create massive headaches and, more importantly, create security risks. As a result, the company helps developers manage identity and authentication, whether through social media logins or through enterprise authentication systems.

“If you believe Marc Andreessen that software is eating the world — and I do — then authentication is the lynchpin,” said Trinity’s Karan Mehandru, who’s joining Auth0’s board of directors, in the same report. According to Mehandru, while other companies in the market focus on certain areas, like logins or two-factor authentication only, Auth0 has adopted an asymmetric approach with what he called a “very elegant solution” that is a single platform that’s intersecting with the developer.

There are concerns throughout the payments and commerce ecosystems that any digital identity being presented might not be what it seems (i.e., fraudulent). That potential concern can manifest into a literal one in the goals that businesses seek to achieve: protecting account data, while simultaneously authenticating a customer’s identity. Services like Auth0 aim to help companies and developers with those concerns.