Yubico raises $30M as it looks to expand its platform beyond authentication

Yubico, the company behind the increasingly popular YubiKey two-factor authentication key, has raised a $30 million funding round. This marks the first major institutional funding round for Yubico, which had previously only raised $4.5 million from angel investors.

New investors include New Enterprise Associates, the Valley Fund and Bure, a major growth equity firm from Sweden.

Existing angel investors include the likes of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Yubico chairman Ram Shriram. The team notes that half of the company is still owned by the founders and team (which is something few companies announce when they receive new funding).

The company says it plans to use the new funding on product development and to expand its team. Specifically, Yubico plans to expand beyond authentication. “With limited angel funding we have built a solid security hardware platform, co-created a new global authentication standard, and won the world’s largest Internet companies as our customers,” Yubico CEO and Founder Stina Ehrensvard told me. “Now is the time to scale our product development team, and expand with more advanced software and services, including for IoT, payments and server encryption.”

Yubico currently has offices in Sweden, the U.K., Germany, the United States, Australia and Singapore.

“With nine of the top ten internet companies as YubiKey users, Yubico has built a strong foundation as an innovator of new global authentication standards,” said Pete Sonsini, general partner, NEA, in today’s announcement. “In a time when software does not offer sufficient protection for online accounts and sensitive data on servers, Yubico’s hardware backed keys are proven at scale.”

Over the course of the last few years, Yubico managed to turn its hardware keys into something akin to a de facto standard for users who want to add an extra level of security to their online accounts. To get to this point, Yubico partnered with many of the largest online service providers, and its current list of partners that support its keys include Facebook, Google, GitHub, SalesForce, Atlassian, Dropbox, Dashlane, Docker and a few dozen others. With the YubiHSM, the company also offers a security module for protecting servers.