Beyond Identity, which offers a password-free zero trust multifactor authentication service for enterprises, raises a $100M Series C at a $1.1B valuation
If multifactor authentication (MFA) is one of our best hopes for making a dent in cybercrime, it could be a while before everyone's actually using it.
Context & Ripple Effects
Beyond Identity has now closed three rounds in under two years: a $30M Series A in April 2020, a $75M Series B that December, and today's $100M Series C at a $1.1B valuation — crossing the unicorn line on certificates-based, passwordless MFA that requires no change to existing security infrastructure.
The round lands in a category where big money has already validated demand: Auth0 raised a $103M Series E at a $1B valuation back in 2019 with 7,000 enterprise clients, and Keyfactor later pulled in over $1B to manage billions of machine identities — evidence that investors treat identity infrastructure, not endpoint tools, as the durable layer.
First-order effects
- Beyond Identity gains roughly doubling-scale war chest to push its zero trust MFA into enterprise accounts still relying on passwords, competing directly against established authentication platforms like Auth0 for the same buyers.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent authentication vendors face pressure to accelerate their own passwordless roadmaps or risk losing greenfield deployments, while certificate authorities and PKI suppliers gain an adjacent market as credential-based identity spreads beyond machine identities toward human users.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Auth0, Keyfactor, and now Beyond Identity all raising nine-figure rounds — identity and access management consolidates into a platform market where cryptographic, passwordless credentials become the default enterprise perimeter rather than an add-on.
The trend: Enterprise identity security is being repriced around passwordless, certificate-based authentication, with venture capital treating it as core infrastructure rather than a niche MFA feature.