Austin-based identity security startup 443ID announced Wednesday that it has emerged from stealth with $8 million in seed funding from Bill Wood Ventures and Silverton Partners.
The company was co-founded last year by Stephen Shoaff and Mark Batchelor with the goal of bringing open source intelligence, or OSINT, to the identity security marketplace.
The new seed funding will allow 443ID to grow its five-person team to a 25-person team with expertise in identity and access management, cybersecurity, cryptocurrency, adtech and open source intelligence sectors. The team will build the company’s open source intelligence identity graph, which will power its first products: OSINT Risk and SignalPrint.
While the identity and access management field has made great strides in improving the strength of authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication, 443ID argues these approaches are almost entirely dependent on internal data assets collected from user engagement. This means companies are missing out on insights that could be gained from open source intelligence data sourced from outside an organization.
443ID claims its technology allows users of identity and access management platforms to use the power of open source intelligence to make better risk-based decisions about how to authenticate, register and engage users.
“OSINT data is a rapidly growing and powerful dataset used successfully for investigative purposes to date,” Shoaff said in a statement. “Bringing this data to identity security adds the value of outside risk to existing login, registration and other zero-trust flows. Our offering makes it possible to leverage OSINT for decision making on the fly, at login speed — not after the fact.”
