Introducing Authsignal
My first scout investment
I’m excited to announce my first scout investment for Blackbird Ventures, an Australasian investment firm with a $7bn portfolio, whose mission is to invest in wild hearts, with the wildest ideas, right from the beginning.
Introducing Authsignal, an identity orchestration and authentication platform that makes it easy for companies to offer world-class security and user experience.
This investment into Authsignals pre-seed actually happened late last year. So better now than never! The team has executed exceptionally fast in the time since. Not only have they built and launched their product, but have also signed a bluechip enterprise customer to a multiyear deal.
I’m going to touch on key parts of my thought process, and why Authsignal was a company I wanted to back.
Cyber security threats are rising
First up, the company has to solve a big and painful problem.
Data breaches and account takeovers are increasingly in the headlines and carry a huge financial and reputational cost for businesses. One that sticks out recently was Australian telecommunications giant Optus, which revealed about 10 million customers - about 40% of the population - had personal data stolen in what it calls a cyber attack. These kinds of breaches can also lead to Account Takeovers (ATO) attacks whereby cybercriminals take ownership of online accounts using stolen passwords and usernames purchased via the dark web.
Not only is this a rapidly growing problem, but defense against these attacks is fragmented and results in a poor customer experience. Through my time in financial services, I’ve seen and experienced this pain firsthand and got super excited when I saw the product Authsignal was building.
Plug and play
Here lies the opportunity: as data and security risks become larger and more complex, it also becomes harder to deliver world-class consumer experiences. It’s not trivial to do both well.
Authsignal makes it incredibly easy for companies to build their own digital identity experiences.
Authsignal has created an ecosystem of the world's best authentication products. As an Authsignal customer, you have the freedom to use any underlying authentication product from the ecosystem, with Authsignal able to orchestrate all the important identity and authentication logic.
The result is simple integration and seamless user experience.
There is also the option of a no-code fraud rules engine. This enables FraudOps teams to design their own rules, deploy and manage them, taking away the need for engineers. For example, take time and location as a factor. Where one user is shown to log in from two locations that would be physically impossible to travel between, the engine can challenge the attempts and request further verification automatically.
Here are a few real-world examples that Authsignal can power:
A rental car company offers keyless access to their cars and has a requirement to put customers through mobile biometrics before they can unlock the vehicle on pick-up.
An airline wants to allow passengers to check in internationally without visiting a kiosk so has to confirm that the person checking in matches the passenger on their records.
An investment platform needs to place customers through an automated workflow to reauthenticate customer accounts that display signs of account takeover.
A bank facilitates instant payments and needs an additional step to authenticate payments to reduce the chance they are fraudulent.
The applications for this product are incredibly broad. All of these examples have a growing need to correctly identify the consumer before an action is taken whilst delivering a great experience. Often it won’t make sense for these companies to build this themselves, as they don’t have the expertise and time.
It’s still early days
The beauty of the product is in founder Justin Soong’s personal experience. His vision for Authsignal is born from battle scars while working on consumer fintech platforms. He’s an engineer by trade and has worked across numerous high-growth companies including as CTO of ASX-listed Laybuy.
My hope is that this investment in Authsignal drives tangible change and reduces instances of data breaches and account takeovers. The team has been incredibly capital-efficient, shipped fast, and has meaningful revenue for such an early-stage company. Watch this space!
Congrats mate!