After Its $6M Series A, PasswordBox Acquires Digital Afterlife Service Legacy Locker To Grow Its User Base

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PasswordBox, the increasingly popular password management solution, today announced that it has acquired Legacy Locker, a digital afterlife service that – in the inevitable case that you pass away – grants access to your online assets to your friends and loved ones. With this acquisition, PasswordBox says, it is now “the only free service to manage your online accounts during life and after.”

Last week, PasswordBox also announced that it had closed a $6 million Series A round led by Canada’s Omers Ventures — so it’s evidently splashing some of that cash on this acquisition, although it’s not saying how much.

Legacy Locker was founded by Jeremy Toeman and launched back in 2009. Today, Toeman is the CEO of Dijit, a b2b platform for the entertainment industry and the company behind the personalized TV guide service NextGuide. “Over the past four years, we have taken the market by storm with our online safety deposit box for internet passwords,” said Toeman in a statement today. “Now our customers will benefit from the next wave of technology that will allow them to manage their current digital life, while ensuring their digital afterlife is still being protected too.” Toeman will join PasswordBox as an advisor.

It’s unclear how many users Legacy Locker currently has, but all of its current users will get a free lifetime subscription to PasswordBox’s service as part of this acquisition. As the PasswordBox team told TechCrunch, Legacy Locker’s features will be incorporated into its existing product and the company plans to continue to develop it over time. 

PasswordBox also confirmed to TechCrunch that Legacy Locker’s customers would be migrated to PasswordBox over the next 60 days (after which Legacy Locker itself will go dark).

While most of us probably don’t spent a lot of time thinking about what happens to our digital assets after our death, we’ve seen the rise of a number of similar digital afterlife services in the past. Companies like AssetLock, Cirrus Legacy and even Google (with its Inactive Account Manager) now offer services that are similar to Legacy Locker’s features.

As Jason Kincaid wrote when he first reviewed Legacy Locker in 2009, “the real issue with Legacy Locker (and other ‘online wills’) is that they are only useful if the company exists for many years, which is hardly a given for most startups.” For the time being, at least, it looks like the service has found a safe haven at Password Box, which seems to be on track to becoming a sizable company.

Death is never an easy conversation; talking about one’s own inevitable demise, even less so. Which likely explains why PasswordBox has decided that getting customers for this portion of its business through acquisition is easier than shouting about impending demise to try and acquire new ones.

PasswordBox itself, which has had its password and legacy management service up and running for four months, has been on a growth tear, passing one million users in September. But it’s notable that it’s not just doing legacy management. Rather that service is a bolt-on vs its primary focus of password management — and a planned move into the biometrics security space.

Legacy management is therefore a differentiating feature for PasswordBox, not a primary focus. Death on its own, is evidently a tough sell.