Bitwarden’s $100 Million Investment will Accelerate Addition of Passwordless Authentication and Developers Secrets
The open source password manager provider, Bitwarden, has raised $100 million in funding which will be used to provide greater support for its user community and accelerate product development to help the firm achieve its long-term goals more rapidly. This is the first funding round to be publicly disclosed by the company. The funding round was led by the private equity firm PSG, with previous Bitwarden investor, Battery Ventures, also participating.
Bitwarden has developed a popular password manager that is used by tens of thousands of businesses worldwide and millions of users, with the platform offering a wide range of functions to meet the needs of businesses and consumers. The platform is available in more than 50 languages, with around half of the company’s business coming from outside North America. The company is planning to use some of the funding to accelerate growth in the Asian and European markets, as well as South America and Australia, which are currently served through channel partners in those regions.
Bitwarden’s goal is to empower individuals by providing the knowledge and tools to help them keep themselves and their companies secure and prevent the growing number of data breaches that occur due to the use of weak or reused passwords. The platform allows users to easily set a complex, unique password for all accounts, and also has the capability to set unique usernames for each account.
The password management market is extremely competitive with many password management solutions available to help businesses and consumers improve password security. Bitwarden is planning to use a sizeable chunk of the investment to accelerate product development to better meet the needs of businesses. In addition to helping its clients protect their current SaaS systems, Bitwarden is planning on developing a new ‘developer secrets’ offering, to help companies with the application development process to store the many passwords and secrets used for their application infrastructure. There are currently limited password manager solutions that have this capability. For example, the current market-leading password management solution, LastPass, does not have those capabilities.
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Bitwarden’s Chief Customer Officer, Gary Orenstein, said the open source nature of Bitwarden, the ability to self-host the solution, and the willingness of the company to provide a full-featured version of the platform to individuals set the solution apart from the competition. Bitwarden is also planning to use some of the investment funds to incorporate passwordless authentication into the solutions, such as biometrics, FIDO security keys, and passkeys, and improve integrations with single-sign-on systems. Orenstein said its customers have reported that privileged access management (PAM) technology doesn’t currently meet their needs. Orenstein said the company is planning to right-size current PAM tools by working first with individuals, and will then work with its business customers to solve their PAM needs.
“By taking a differentiated approach to password management — one that serves individuals and business, one that stands by open-source, one that makes a fully featured free version available to the world — I believe Bitwarden has leapt ahead in the market,” said Bitwarden CEO Michael Crandell. “The rapidly expanding Bitwarden customer base, including small and large companies alike, combined with a highly engaged community, in our view, continues to set Bitwarden apart from other solutions.”
