443ID emerges from stealth and raises $8 million to launch its first products
443ID announced its emergence from stealth mode and the closing of an $8 million seed funding round. Bill Wood Ventures and Silverton Partners co-led the round.
The fresh capital has enabled 443ID to hire experts spanning the identity and access management, cybersecurity, cryptocurrency, adtech and open source intelligence (OSINT) realms to build the company’s OSINT identity graph powering its first products: OSINT Risk and SignalPrint.
Co-founded in 2021 by Stephen Shoaff and Mark Batchelor, Austin-headquartered 443ID is on a mission to bring the power of OSINT to the identity security marketplace. The company’s technology permits users of today’s most popular identity and access management platforms to leverage the power of OSINT to make context-driven, risk-based decisions on how to authenticate, register and engage their respective users. OSINT data makes risk decisions accessible to any size organization in a simple, transparent and affordable way.
“OSINT data is a rapidly growing and powerful dataset used successfully for investigative purposes to date,” said Stephen Shoaff, 443ID co-founder and CEO. “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.”
“443ID’s ability to provide a comprehensive view of business risk intelligence, including integrated third party data, in real-time—is unique within the identity security market,” said Morgan Flager, Managing Partner of Silverton. “We are excited to support Stephen Shoaff and the rest of the 443ID team in helping their customers make better operational security decisions.”
Bringing outside data to the identity security market
Significant progress has been made during the past few decades in the identity and access management market, especially around improving the strength of authentication methods with Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), behavioral analytics and other techniques. However, these approaches have been almost entirely dependent on internal data assets collected during user engagement over time.
This inside centric view of a user misses out on key insights OSINT data sourced outside an organization can provide. Insights that help determine optimal security and engagement decisions while building confidence in knowing with whom one is dealing, building an informed opinion on a user at their first engagement as well as that individual’s outside-risk profile. 443ID’s OSINT identity graph now allows users of the most popular identity and access management platforms to make more contextual decisions on how to authenticate, register or authorize users in a transparent and affordable way.
“We’re grateful and proud to have Bill Wood Ventures and Silverton Partners supporting our mission,” Shoaff said. “Their backing is validation of 443ID’s leadership in the identity and access management OSINT community. Both firms have stellar reputations in the identity-security and cybersecurity sectors.”
Bill Wood and Silverton Partners were previously lead investors in UnboundID, which Denver-based Ping Identity acquired in 2016. Shoaff co-founded UnboundID in 2007 and served as its CEO.