Passwords aren’t dead yet. Bitwarden raises $100M for password manager

Are passwords dead? With many vendors like Microsoft, Apple, and Google moving alongside the FIDO Alliance towards passwordless authentication options and credential-based attacks on the rise, you’d be forgiven for thinking passwords are disappearing, but credentials don’t just happen. yet.

Just today, open source password manager Bitwarden announced that it has received a $100 million investment from PSG, a growth capital company, with the participation of Battery Ventures, stressing that password management still has an integral role to play in business and consumer security for the foreseeable future.

For enterprises, the investment highlights that while passwordless authentication options are proliferating, improved password management can still provide an effective response to the onslaught of credentials theft and phishing emails.

The state of passwords in 2022

The announcement comes as more and more users struggle to manage their online passwords, with Research showing that 39% of Americans report experiencing a high degree of password fatigue.

This is not surprising given the sheer number of accounts that users are juggling. In reality, NordPass estimates that each person has to manage 80-100 passwords, making it mentally exhausting to create strong and unique passwords for each online account.

As a result, many users resort to reusing credentials and selecting weaker passwords to facilitate logging into their online accounts. This inevitably makes it easier for cybercriminals to carry out account takeover attempts in a highly debilitating threat landscape.

Research shows that 81% of companies within the FTSE 100 had at least one credentials compromised and displayed on the dark web, with a total of 31,135 stolen and leaked credentials for these companies.

Password Management vs Credential Theft

While some providers are responding to this threat landscape by eliminating credentials altogether, organizations like Bitwarden remain determined that better password management is the answer to protect users from these types of threats.

“Password management has become a mandatory part of every company’s security stack,” said Michael Crandell, CEO at Bitwarden.

“Bitwarden helps businesses and individuals stay protected with strong and unique passwords for all their online accounts. This helps companies prevent breaches and ransomware and helps individuals prevent identity theft,” Crandell said.

In practice, Bitwarden provides users with a virtual space to store their passwords, in addition to features such as credential autofill, automatic password generation, and password strength scoring, to more effectively manage the security of their passwords at scale to reduce fatigue.

A look at the password management market

Bitwarden is one of the largest providers of password management global marketwhich researchers expect to reach a value of $2.9 billion by 2027 as more users and organizations try to manage passwords more proactively.

The organization competes with a number of established competitors in the space, including: LastPasswhich provides a password manager utility that allows you to login without a password through the LastPass Authenticator and use a built-in generator to create strong passwords.

LastPass was drawn out by Elliott Management’s private equity firm and Francesco Partners last year for $4.3 billion.

Another major competitor is 1Password, a provider that provides one-click login to sites, password generation capabilities, and an insights dashboard where users can monitor password health. Earlier this year, 1Password closed a $620 million deal series C financing round and reached a valuation of $6.8 billion.

The main difference between Bitwarden and other competitors is not only that it is open source, but it also offers a free password manager for unlimited logins and devices that can be deployed in the cloud or through a self-hosted installation to ensure that organizations can use external devices. compliance requirements.