Stytch Inc., a startup providing identity access management infrastructure for developers, today announced the general availability of its Passkeys offering for developers, which offers an easier way to build, customize and maintain passkey-based authentication in their applications.

The company says the new solution offers a flexible, application programming interface-first approach to passkeys that abstracts the complexity of cross-platform implementation while maintaining guardrails for application and user security. Using the service, developers can quickly and easily build a passkey experience tailored to their applications without exposing security vulnerabilities or maintaining the implementation as the technology evolves, according to Stytch.

The Passkey solution has been designed to address the rapidly accelerating adoption of passkeys. Although passkeys offer a safer and more user-friendly alternative to passwords, Stytch Chief Executive Officer Reed McGinley-Stempel told SiliconANGLE in an interview they also pose intricate challenges for developers during implementation. Issues include architecting for multiple platforms, adapting to every update from those platforms, addressing account recovery and lockout issues, configuring creation settings and managing user interface complexities such as autofill and syncing.

McGinley-Stempel and Julianna Lamb, Stytch’s co-founder and chief technology officer, came from a financial services provider company called Plaid Inc., which provided user experience for authenticating for banks and also fraud prevention where they saw first hand the use of passwords. During their time at the company, both witnessed how users would forget passwords, and passwords became a vector for theft and attacks, and how developers themselves had difficulty implementing the service.

Passwords themselves could be a pain point because if a single company was breached, that meant that 20 million passwords or more could be leaked into the wild putting customers at risk. This is not a problem for passkeys.

With the proliferation of artificial intelligence-assisted phishing scams — emails that attempt to fool people into giving up their identity and login information — passwords are becoming an even greater liability, as email and text message attacks have become even more sophisticated at targeting individuals to trick them into giving up their login credentials. Since the fourth quarter of 2022, there has been a 1,265% increase in malicious phishing emails designed to steal people’s passwords, according to a report by cybersecurity firm SlashNext. Large scale companies have already begun to impalement them including Google LLC, Okta Inc., Amazon.com Inc. Major password management application providers such as 1Password have also announced support for passkeys.

Although existing passkey solutions solve some of these challenges, they severely restrict the ability of developers to customize authentication logic and UIs to match the experience and branding of their applications, explained McGinley-Stempel. The issues with implementing passkeys can result in a disjointed user experience and security vulnerabilities, undermining the advantages of transitioning to passwordless authentication in the first place. This is where Stytch’s new offering comes in.

“We aimed to build a solution to this in-house because we couldn’t get it from vendors,” said McGinley-Stempel. “We’re looking to be a ‘Stripe’ for authentication, something that is API-first, but very modern, very flexible and a great developer experience.”

To get there, Stych offers what McGinley-Stempel said is a robust toolkit for developers to build, implement and customize passkey-based authentication with the backing of a flexible identity platform. The platform provides developers full flexibility to add passkeys to their authentication experience in the exact way they want.

Stytch’s Passkeys offering includes the flexibility to integrate with web and mobile software development kits or a fully composable API, similar to how the payments platform Stripe Inc. allows developers to completely integrate its payments processing capabilities directly into applications and web pages. Stytch handles building and implementing passkeys from scratch, allowing developers to implement passkeys confidently.

Using the service, developers can build passkeys with Stytch’s frontend and mobile SDKs and leverage out-of-the-box UI components for easy implementation and setup, the company says. For building tailored passkeys solutions, developers can use the API, which includes features such as smart defaults for authenticator type, user verification, and discoverable credentials.

The new service integrates fully with Stytch’s suite of authentication offerings. In addition to offering passkeys, developers can leverage Stytch’s platform to provide a suite of authentication options, from passwordless to multifactor authentication to single sign-on.

With Stytch’s end-to-end identity platform applications can have complete protection across the entire authentication and authorization lifecycle, with the support of a suite of fraud and risk tools like Device Fingerprinting that enables users to identify devices, recognize returning users and block bots and fraudsters.

“I am pretty bullish that passkeys will be the biggest accelerant towards passwordless,” said McGinley-Stempel. “My personal guess is that by the end of 2025, I think the vast majority of applications will have passkeys as a predominant option. This will be driven by the some of the major players realizing it’s a better technology.”

A venture capital-backed company, the company has raised $146 million to date, according to Tracxn, including a round of $90 million on a $1 billion valuation in 2021. Investors include Coatue Management L.P., Benchmark Capital Partners LLC, Thrive Capital Partners LP and Index Venture Management LLP.

Images: Stytch