Duo Security: Making Advanced Security Available to All
Today we are excited to announce that Redpoint is leading a growth investment in Duo Security, an emerging leader in the two-factor authentication market. Dug Song and his team have architected an enterprise security solution that is elegant, highly effective, and easy-to-use and deploy. We‘re proud to back such a renowned security team expanding the two-factor authentication and access security market to all enterprises.
It is no secret that security breaches are the frequent subject of newspaper headlines. Hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated, and the cost of each breach continues to rise. One of the most common causes for these high-profile security breaches is employee credential theft. With more employees logging in remotely to a variety of corporate data and cloud services, hackers with stolen credentials can access large amounts of sensitive corporate data.
While virtually all enterprises have advanced perimeter security defenses, these defenses are not optimized to stop a hacker logging into a corporate server or cloud service with stolen, yet valid, employee credentials. Two-factor authentication solutions emerged to solve this problem initially through hardware-based token products that proved to be very expensive and cumbersome to use and (not immune from being hacked, as RSA found out a few years back).
As a result, until recently, only the largest enterprises embraced two-factor authentication, leaving thousands of other enterprises vulnerable to security breaches based on credential theft.
Recognizing this opportunity, Dug Song and Jon Oberheide (both previously of Arbor Networks), set out to solve the problem by creating a flexible, easy-to-use, two-factor authentication solution for all enterprises leveraging the ubiquity of the smartphone. With Duo Push, users simply type in their credentials and with one-tap on their smartphones they can log into their corporate VPNs, SaaS platforms and on-premise applications.
Entire enterprises can be deployed in a matter of hours through a fast self-enrollment process, removing the need for complicated provisioning of hard tokens or clunky mobile apps and SMS codes. Additionally, Duo Security provides easy integration with dozens of cloud apps and allows enterprises to create many custom security features and policies.
Sometimes the most interesting opportunities happen when the right technology meets the market at just the right time. In the case of Duo Security, enterprises of all sizes are realizing the perils of credential theft and the need for two-factor authentication for their employees.
By providing the most secure, least invasive, most usable solution to this problem, it is no wonder that Duo Security has managed to quickly grow and land over 5,000 customers including: Facebook, Box, Paramount, Toyota, and WhatsApp. Dug and his team are committed to providing their customers advanced security solutions beyond two-factor authentication, and just today announced Duo Platform which allows IT teams to define policies for access, automate enforcement of controls based on risk, gain visibility into access-related security threats and get insight into the security profile of end user devices.
Redpoint’s growth fund looks to partner with emerging market leaders and founders who want to build large independent companies. We are very excited to be working with Dug and his team, which now includes Zack Urlocker as COO. Zack previously held that role at Redpoint portfolio company Zendesk and no doubt plans to bring the successful Zendesk growth playbook to Duo Security.
Congratulations Dug and team on the tremendous progress so far. We are looking forward to working with you on the journey ahead!
Note: Duo's Platform Edition is now known as Duo Access - with even more features. Please visit our Pricing page to view our latest editions.