Beyond Identity, which uses certificates to provide passwordless identity management, raises $75M Series B, bringing its total raised to $105M
Beyond Identity, a New York-based startup developing passwordless identity management solutions, raised $75 million in venture capital.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Beyond Identity's second round of 2020: the company raised a $30M Series A led by KDT and NEA just eight months ago, and this $75M Series B more than triples total funding to $105M. Its pitch — certificates that eliminate passwords without forcing changes to existing security infrastructure — targets the same enterprise authentication budget that Auth0 built a developer-focused identity business on.
The raise lands in a crowded, well-funded lane: Secret Double Octopus closed its own $15M Series B weeks earlier for workplace passwordless authentication, and PlainID has since drawn large rounds for adjacent identity and access management tooling. Capital is converging on the assumption that the password's role in enterprise login is ending.
First-order effects
- Beyond Identity gains the runway to push its no-infrastructure-change passwordless product into enterprise accounts where rivals like Secret Double Octopus are selling comparable deployments.
- KDT and NEA's Series A bet is validated quickly enough that the company skips the usual multi-year gap between institutional rounds.
Second-order effects
- Competing passwordless vendors face pressure to match the funding pace or differentiate on deployment model, since Beyond Identity's certificate approach claims to remove the integration cost that slows adoption.
- Enterprises evaluating multifactor authentication get a growing set of capitalized alternatives to incumbent credential systems, shifting procurement conversations from 'whether' to drop passwords toward 'which' vendor replaces them.
Third-order effects
- If the funding pattern holds across Beyond Identity, Secret Double Octopus, and PlainID, enterprise identity consolidates around zero trust architectures where certificates and devices — not shared secrets — anchor authentication.
- Sustained venture investment in this category signals that password replacement is becoming infrastructure rather than a feature, reshaping how security budgets are allocated away from password management tools.
The trend: Enterprise identity is shifting from password-based credentials toward certificate-backed passwordless authentication, with venture capital accelerating the race to own the replacement layer.