‍

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with 1Password, creators of the world's most loved password manager.

1Password is trusted by millions of users globally, 50,000+ paying business customers, and 25% of the Fortune 100, including leading enterprises such as IBM, Slack, Pagerduty, Dropbox, GitLab and Roche. We’re excited to be investing alongside the Slack Fund, Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes & Scott Farquhar, Atlassian president Jay Simons, and several notable angels.

This investment marks a major milestone for both 1Password and Accel.

‍

This is 1Password’s first investment after 14 years of tremendous growth. Like other bootstrapped companies outside Silicon Valley that we've partnered with, including Atlassian, Tenable, and Qualtrics, 1Password has been profitable since day one. In the process, the team created one of the most passionate and loyal user communities.

For Accel, this is our largest initial investment in any company in our more than 35-year history. It signals our belief in 1Password’s mission to secure their users’ online footprint and our conviction in the market opportunity this presents.

We first met two of 1Password's founders, Dave Teare and Roustem Karimov, and CEO, Jeff Shiner, six years ago. We've watched as their business has evolved tremendously since that first meeting on a chilly, winter afternoon in Toronto. At the time of that meeting, they were scaling their consumer-focused product and in the process of releasing a business solution. Now, their Enterprise Password Manager (EPM) is used by tens of thousands of businesses (including 40+ in Accel’s portfolio). They've added numerous features broadening the scope of their product beyond password management, including SCIM Bridge and Advanced Protection. All the while, the company has doubled headcount every other year and scaled their distributed team to 170+ people.

One defining quality of 1Password, however, hasn't changed. Something that has resonated with us ever since that first conversation: the team has an unwavering focus on serving its users. It's so important that every employee spends time answering customer support requests to gather user feedback. It pushes them to prioritize user privacy in every feature they build. It is a passion that shines through in their product experience, and it’s the secret to how they've been able to build a security product that people actually enjoy using.

Businesses of all sizes know that passwords remain a critical vulnerability in their security posture. Let’s face it - we’re all guilty of using some derivative of our birthdate, favorite pet, or nickname as our passwords. Even worse, we reuse the same passwords for our personal and business accounts and share our sensitive credentials with colleagues on sticky notes.

As the number of cloud-based services has exploded and the frequency of online breaches has increased, CISOs and IT teams have responded by implementing a variety of security measures. Single-Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) tools have become common in the workplace. Despite these advances, enterprises are still exposed. SSO only integrates with a portion of the apps and websites we use daily, and MFA creates an additional layer of friction for users.

Alongside SSO and MFA, 1Password’s EPM solution is the critical third pillar of the enterprise identity stack. By helping employees create complex passwords, automate login authentication, and facilitate the safe sharing of credentials, 1Password defends enterprise security’s weakest link: passwords.

1Password is a special company. We're honored to partner with Dave, Jeff, Natalia, Roustem, Sara, and the entire 1Password team as they continue to protect our sensitive data, at home and at work.

Read more from founder Dave Teare on his blog post here and some of today’s press here.

--Arun Mathew, Ethan Choi

‍