Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Userfront

We’re excited to welcome Userfront, Heavybit’s newest portfolio company, an identity and access platform (IAM) for modern software applications. As companies and their products mature, their identity needs also evolve, particularly as they move upmarket and take on enterprise customers with more stringent requirements. Userfront’s innovative approach provides their customers with a single solution that starts with just a few lines of code and scales across all of their different use-cases. It seamlessly handles everything from small self-serve accounts up to large enterprise organizations in a single product.

Why We’re Excited

Something we’ve seen consistently across a wide swath of software products is that identity is one of the hardest things to get right and an area where most fall well short of unlocking their full potential. Software companies are increasingly pursuing bottom-up or product-led go-to-markets where they start with a high-velocity stream of small-to-medium sized accounts that need low-friction, self-serve access with popular SSO providers. Moving upmarket and bringing in bigger customers means bigger deals – but it also makes important security considerations like, MFA, SAML, RBAC, etc a hard requirement.

Historically you’ve had two choices here, either building a bespoke internal solution for each type of customer or alternatively purchase and manage identity split across multiple products. Userfront sets itself apart from the field by not only embracing modern front-end frameworks, but also by recognizing that modern B2B software products have different classes of end-users and enabling you to meet all of your customers where they are in one product. You select the services that are appropriate for each of your end-customers–with a suite of capabilities built for enterprises that can be streamlined for SMBs.

Userfront is uniquely well-equipped to accelerate modern identity and authorization processes. The first generation of cloud native IAM products were built and designed for the world of server-side, full-stack web frameworks that dominated application development 15 years ago where identity management primarily happened on the back-end via API’s. As application development has shifted towards sophisticated front-end frameworks, so has identity logic, and trying to stitch together all these workflows in a front-end app using coarse-grained APIs has become increasingly painful. Userfront was built from first principles for a component-based world and you can go live with just a few lines of JavaScript.

Not content to stop there however, Userfront has upped the ante with Sidecar, an optional, batteries-included microservice that can be deployed to enable a wide range of use cases not possible with a pure 3rd party solution, such as bolt-on multi factor authentication or custom data residency. As an example of how powerful this abstraction is, Sidecar dramatically simplifies migration from legacy IAM solutions like AWS Cognito, allowing you to transparently and securely move existing user-accounts without requiring password resets.

We’re proud to have led their Seed financing and look forward to working with them as they build out the product, continue to delight a growing customer base, and build out the team. If you’ve found your existing identity solution lacking, get in touch or learn more about Userfront by visiting the website!

Meet the Founder

Tyler Warnock

Founder & CEO, Userfront

Tyler Warnock is CEO and cofounder of Userfront. He has dual Masters Degrees from Stanford in Business Administration and Mechanical Engineering, and has previously been a software engineer, a researcher for DARPA at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a venture investor at Capricorn Investment Group.