Remote work and cloud adoption lands 1Password with $620M Series C, now valued at $6.8B

Password management platform 1Password has closed a massive $620 million Series C funding round that raises the company’s valuation to $6.8 billion.

The investment was led by Iconiq Growth, with participation from Tiger Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Backbone Angels and Accel, which led the company’s $200 million Series A and $100 million Series B rounds. Other investors taking part include CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, General Motors CEO Mary Barry and LinkedIn chairman Jeff Weiner. The round also attracted investment from investors Ryan Reynolds, Robert Downey Jr. and Justin Timberlake.

The bumper funding round follows an impressive year of growth for 1Password. The company told TechCrunch that since its Series B raise in July last year, it has increased its paying business customer base from 90,000 to more than 100,000 — adding big-name corporate subscribers including Datadog, Intercom and Snowflake — and has grown its internal headcount from 475 to 570 employees. This, the company says, has been driven by three things: the continuation of remote and hybrid working, the rapid adoption of cloud apps and the acceleration of work-related burnout.

The latter point is becoming a particularly worrying cybersecurity threat, according to the company, which found that 80% of office workers and 84% of security specialists are feeling burned out as a result of the pandemic, with 12% using the same password or just a few different passwords for everything at work as a result.

“We’ve found that when you have stress and burnout, two things happen,” 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner tells TechCrunch. “Firstly, people look for the easy way — when you’re overworked, you’re going to put security on the back-burner. The other side effect of stress and burnout has been a desire to change, and you see that in the Great Resignation. That leads to security issues because all those apps and services that IT are not aware of you’re now taking with you.”

1Password will use its newly raised funds to drive continued growth; the company said it plans to triple its engineering and customer support teams, to build out its business-focused Events API functionality that provides visibility into successful and failed sign-in attempts, and to finance more acquisitions.

“We’re looking at strategic acquisitions,” Shiner says. “We made an acquisition last year with Secret Hub, and we will continue to look at acquisitions and how those can help us achieve our mission and goals.”

Ultimately, though the Series C funding round provides 1Password with a substantial amount of capital, Shiner says the company has no plans for an exit “just yet.”

The funding will “give us the sleep-at-night ability to go after some of the big bets that we need to take,” said Shiner.