As the idea of the AI agent begins to take hold and more tasks are completed without human involvement, a new type of authentication will be required to ensure that only agents with appropriate permission can access certain resources. Anon, a young startup, is helping developers add automated authentication in a secure way.
On Wednesday, the company announced a $6.5 million investment — and that the product is now generally available to everyone.
The idea for this company came to the founders out of necessity. Their first idea was actually to develop an AI agent, but CEO Daniel Mason says they quickly ran into a problem with authentication – simply put, how to automatically and securely enter a username and password. “We kept coming up against the hard side of customers who wanted us to
He started asking around about how other AI startups handled authentication and found that there weren’t really any good answers. “In fact, many of the solutions people were using were actually quite a bit less secure. They mostly inherited authentication credentials from a user’s local computer or browser-based permissions,” he said.
And as they looked deeper into this problem, they realized that this was actually a better idea for a company than their original idea for an AI agent. At this point, they evolved into a developer tool for building an automated authentication layer for AI-driven applications and workflows. The solution is delivered in the form of a Software Development Kit (SDK) and allows developers to integrate authentication for a specific service with a few lines of code. “We want to sit on that authentication layer and really build access permissions, and our customers in particular are the developers,” Mason said.
The company is addressing security concerns about an automated authentication tool by working toward building a zero-trust architecture in which credentials are protected in a few key ways. First of all, they never control the credentials themselves; These are held by the end user. There is also an encryption layer where half the key is held by the user and the other half by Anon, both of which are required to unlock the encryption. Ultimately, the user always has ultimate control.
“Our platform is such that when I grant access, I as a user still retain control of that session – I am the ultimate owner of the password, the username, the 2FA – and that applies to our system as well, or even “If a customer’s system is compromised, they will not have access to those root credentials,” said Kai Aichholz, the company’s co-founder and CTO.
The founders recognize that other companies, large and small, will likely try to solve this problem, but they are betting on an edge and a comprehensive vision that will help them stand out from any competitors. “We want to basically become a one-stop integration platform where you can come in and build these actions and the automation with the confidence that you’re doing it in a secure way and your end-user credentials are secure, as are the automations. “That’s what’s going to happen,” Mason said.
The $6.5 investment is divided into two tranches: a pre-seed investment of approximately $2 million at launch and a seed investment late last year for approximately $4.5 million. dollars was completed. Investors include Union Square Ventures and Abstract Ventures, which led the seed project, as well as Impatient Ventures and ex/ante, which led the pre-seed project, as well as several industry insiders.