1Password, the AgileBits-owned password management software developer, today announced that it has acquired Kolide, an endpoint security platform, for an undisclosed amount.
According to 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner, Kolide founder and CEO Jason Meller and all of Kolide’s 30 employees will join 1Password “as an intact team.” Meller has taken on the role of VP of product at 1Password.
“The hybrid, work-anywhere-and-on-any-device workforce is here to stay, and security has seen a massive impact as a result of this shift,” Jeff Shiner, the CEO of 1Password, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Employees are working across a mix of personal and work-issued devices, and most organizations don’t have a good handle on how to secure access to their applications and data on those devices. Kolide is the only company in the market with this kind of device security and contextual access management solution that can check the health status of a device at the point of authentication in real time before granting access to company applications.”
Boston, Massachusetts-based Kolide occupies the fast-growing global endpoint cybersecurity sector, which is projected to reach $23 billion in value by 2027. Competitors span Huntress, Automox and Uptycs, the last of which is particularly well-financed.
Kolide’s platform, which Meller co-launched in 2016 with Mike Arpaia and Zach Wasserman, offers security-related endpoint alerts, remediation and more delivered via Slack. Customers and their employees get features like security issue context, self-remediation steps for Mac, Windows and Linux devices and a personalized privacy center, all built on the open source and Facebook-led universal endpoint agent project Osquery.
Kolide attempts to prevent unknown endpoint devices from accessing corporate apps. When the platform detects a “risky” device trying to access a company’s network, it blocks the attempt, then recommends steps to the device’s user to restore the device to a “trusted state.”
Kolide’s customer base of over 250 included 1Password at one point (probably uncoincidentally), as well as Databricks, Robinhood, Discord and Anduril. Prior to the acquisition, Kolide managed to pull in $26.6 million in venture capital from OpenView, Matrix and other VCs and angels.
“Kolide is built on the principle that end users, when honestly informed and motivated, are perhaps the most effective resource that security-focused organizations will ever have against the world’s most nuanced and devastating security threats,” Meller told TechCrunch via email. “Right away, we knew that we had created something special and needed to get it into the hands of as many people as we could. 1Password is a company that not only embodies the same values that made creating our product possible, but also has the resources to proliferate end user-focused security solutions to every organization on the planet.”
Kolide is 1Password’s third acquisition after SecretHub, a Dutch cybersecurity company, and Passage, a Texas-based passkey tool provider — and comes at a prosperous moment in the firm’s history.
As of last September, 1Password was recording north of $250 million in annual recurring revenue with a client base of over 100,000 organizations. Facing headwinds in a weak cybersecurity market, 1Password has bucked the trend — raising hundreds of millions of venture dollars at a multi-billion-dollar valuation.
Shiner says that the company expects to add 250 jobs this year.
“1Password has focused on giving businesses the tools they need to make it easy for employees to keep their passwords secure,” Shiner added. “Kolide extends this ability further to make it easy for employees to keep their devices secure. Bringing Kolide’s capability to manage application access based on device health to 1Password creates opportunities to build lower friction, higher productivity security tools to manage access in the hybrid work environment.”
techcrunch.com
