Why I’m More Bullish Than Ever on 1Kosmos
As CMO of 1Kosmos, I’ve had a front-row seat to watch this company evolve over the past five years. When we founded the company, the cybersecurity world was still obsessed with building bigger walls around the perimeter. Password managers were the hot solution. Multi-factor authentication was cutting edge.
We saw something different coming. Identity would become the new perimeter. Passwords would become the liability, not the solution. And users would demand authentication that was both more secure and more convenient than anything available.
The market needed time to catch up to our vision. But it has, in a big way.
The Market Caught Up
Our recent $57 million Series B brings our total funding to over $72 million. This isn’t just validation of our technology. It’s proof that the market has fundamentally shifted. Our recent $194.5 million agreement for Login.gov through Carahsoft shows that enterprise buyers are ready for what we’ve been building.
The timing makes sense. Every week brings news of another devastating breach, another ransomware attack, another company targeted by AI-generated deepfakes. Traditional passwords and even SMS-based two-factor authentication aren’t cutting it anymore. We’re seeing North Korean operatives deepfake their way into US companies through remote interviews and social engineers extract hundreds of millions in losses through the IT Service Desk.
What We Built
Instead of adding another layer to broken systems, we rebuilt the foundation with a platform that verifies you are who you say you are, every single time you log in. No more checking passwords – we verify actual identity.
We use biometrics tied to verified credentials on a private, permissioned ledger. The technology is sophisticated, but the user experience is intuitive: biometric authentication replaces passwords entirely. Users authenticate once with their identity, then access digital and in-person services seamlessly.
The results speak for themselves – millions of daily users, zero successful account takeovers on our platform, and deployment times measured in hours instead of months. Our customers routinely tell us their users prefer our authentication to anything they’ve used before. Business efficiency improves.
The Certifications That Matter
We’re the only platform with full service NIST 800-63-3, FIDO2, and iBeta certifications – and that’s more than alphabet soup. These certifications prove our solution has the highest level of interoperability and works at the highest levels of government security requirements, which is why FedRAMP gave us High Authorization for national security applications.
Where We Go From Here
I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that technology alone doesn’t win markets, but when your technology solves a real problem that’s only getting worse and major enterprises are making significant commitments to deploy it, you know you’re onto something.
The identity verification market is exploding because every organization needs to know their users are who they claim to be – not just once during onboarding, but every time they log in.
Seven years ago, we bet that the future of cybersecurity would be identity-first, passwordless, and privacy-preserving. Today, that future is here, and we’re leading it.
Ready to see what passwordless looks like in practice? Let’s talk.
