The founding team of Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) leader Gigya (now part of SAP), Dor Shany and Rooly Eliezerov, today announced a $6.2 million seed round led by Mayfield and unveiled OwnID, a passwordless identity platform. OwnID is being used by customers like Nestle which see a 38% reduction in account recovery requests.

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“Despite our success with Gigya, we realized that the user problem of forgetting passwords and needing to repeatedly fill out profile forms was still frustrating to consumers and creating friction for businesses”

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Prior to being acquired by SAP, Gigya created the Customer Identity & Access Management category, powering login & registration as a service for 700 customers, managing over 1.7 billion user identities, and being named a leader by Forrester and Gartner.

“Despite our success with Gigya, we realized that the user problem of forgetting passwords and needing to repeatedly fill out profile forms was still frustrating to consumers and creating friction for businesses,” said Shany, OwnID CEO. “So we built a product from the ground up that leapfrogs tokens, apps and magic link solutions to use your phone’s biometrics to turn it into a key. We couple this innovative mindset with a focus on customer satisfaction, constantly iterating the product to meet evolving needs. As a result, our early customers are already seeing business impact in increased registration and reduced account recovery requests.”

“Wrong or reset password requests are a nightmare and customers do not realize that the same password that allows them to access to one Nestlé brand also works for other brands of other categories (coffee, petcare, healthcare, etc.)” said Ana Ochoa, Product Manager, CIAM, Nestle, “We looked for a passwordless solution that was easy to use and had the right protocols so it passed our security and compliance tests. We deployed OwnID starting in July 2021 on our UK Nescafe site and have since rolled it out to a popular recipes site in Panama and a maternal health site in Israel. As a result of our campaigns as well as OwnID, we have found a 38% reduction in account recovery requests. Equally as importantly, we have found OwnID to be a proactive and responsive company that is constantly iterating on product to meet customer needs – for instance, by looking at site flows, they were able to give us a workaround for customers who were unable to use QR codes.”

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OwnID sees rapid customer adoption growth with global multi-brand organizations like Delonghi and Bayer as well as tech startups like GistMD and Trackimo.

“I partnered with Dor and Rooly for more than a decade to build Gigya into an identity leader with a modern approach,” said Patrick Salyer, Mayfield partner, OwnID board member, and former Gigya CEO. “We have been jointly thinking about how to continue solving the distributed identity problem. With the founding of OwnID, Dor and Rooly are embarking on a renewed effort to give consumers control over their digital identities, by creating a 10x better customer experience and delivering a frictionless solution to businesses. We are thrilled to be partnering with the team at the inception stage again to pursue this critical opportunity and look forward to an exciting journey together.”

How OwnID works

OwnID offers a minimalistic “Skip Password” add-on which blends seamlessly into existing registration and login forms (no app needed). The button enables users to authenticate with their phone biometrics. The phone is always the key. So when browsing on desktop or any other device, users scan a QR code and are authenticated by their phone. OwnID can be easily added to existing forms by any developer using OwnID’s self-serving console.

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