Developer of a decentralized-identity solution raises $27 million

The startup behind the decentralized identity system Magic Labs (formerly Fortmatic) raised $27 million following a Series A funding round.

Thrilled to announce we’ve secured $27M in Series A funding!

Big thank you to our amazing developer community, customers, and investors around the world for the support.

🚀 Here’s to future-proofing auth to build a safer, more authentic internet.https://t.co/ZSU7z5nDDe

— Magic (@magic_labs) July 22, 2021

The funding round was led by Northzone.

The financing also came from Tiger Global, Volt Capital, Digital Currency Group, CoinFund, Placeholder, as well as 80 angel investors. Among them are Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Github CTO Jason Warner, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou, and Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList.

The proceeds will be used to scale the platform and double its 30-strong team. Magic Labs will hire developers, product managers, designers, marketers and finance professionals.

The startup aims to create an “internet passport” to guarantee trust between users and web services.

Magic provides a developer kit with a plug & play approach. It allows adding login without passwords via solutions such as magic links and WebAuthn.

In an interview with The Block CEO of the startup Sean Li noted that developers only need to drop in a couple of lines of code to provide authentication for users.

Rather than usernames and passwords, Magic’s solution uses public and private keys. A decentralized identifier is signed with the private key to create an authentication token. It can be used to verify the user’s identity.

The key pairs remain private and can be exported. This allows users to control their own identification data (self-sovereign identity).

Magic Labs supports Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Polkadot and Polygon. According to Li, the list will be expanded to include Bitcoin and other blockchains.

Since its launch in April 2020, Magic Labs has grown its community of developers using the solution by more than tenfold. As a result, the data of millions of customers across companies of all sizes and sectors are protected.

Magic Labs’ solution is used by UserVoice, Decrypt, Fairmint, Polymarket, Nifty, Showtime, Async Art and Brella.

As with Amazon Web Services, the company charges for system access.

In March, Microsoft launched the open-source decentralized identity (DID) solution ION on the Bitcoin blockchain.

In April, the Cardano-backed company IOG (formerly IOHK) and the government of Ethiopia signed an agreement to deploy the Atala PRISM decentralized identity system in the country.

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