SecureAuth, a provider of identity and access management solutions for cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, today announced it has acquired passwordless authentication startup Acceptto. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

Founded out of Portland in 2013, Acceptto offers a solution for “continuous passwordless authentication.” The company says its eGuardian platform can calculate whether an access attempt is legitimate or not by tracking user behavior and device posture pre-authentication, during authentication, and post-authorization. It works with customers in various sectors, including finance, health care, government, and higher education.

SecureAuth already offers the SecureAuth Identity Platform to help organizations prevent misuse of credentials and eliminate identity-related breaches. With this deal, the company will be able to strengthen that solution using Acceptto’s technology, giving it the ability to evaluate the contextual behavior of users and deliver AI-driven continuous passwordless authentication.

This would mean richer identity authentication security for SecureAuth’s customers across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments. In addition to this, the company will also be able to employ threat intelligence for adaptive multi-factor authentication as well as accelerate continuous integration and delivery for the SecureAuth cloud identity access management (IAM) platform.

How Acceptto’s tech works

Acceptto’s eGuardian continuously creates and monitors user behavior profiles based on their interaction with the company’s proprietary It’sMe authenticator. This way, every time an activity occurs, It’sMe gathers actionable intelligence, including browser and device fingerprint, and uses it to optimize the user profile. Then, on every access attempt, the authenticator leverages AI and ML to assign a real-time risk score and continuously validate the user’s identity prior to, during, and post-authentication.

“With this new AI-based identity assurance technology from Acceptto, we can expand the SecureAuth Identity Platform to provide a zero-trust security model for virtually every situation, simple or complex,” Ravi Khatod, CEO and executive chairman at SecureAuth, said in a statement.

“As an industry, we still have a long way ahead of us to deliver fully AI-based authentication policies that are not overly complex and inflexible. But all leading enterprises are asking us today to deliver intuitive high-fidelity authentication journeys to meet their present compliance and security requirements,” he added.

A recent study from One Identity highlighted that enterprises around the world continue to witness an identity sprawl, which has spiked the demand for more holistic IAM solutions to better secure identities. The IAM space has also seen significant activity in recent months, including One Identity’s acquisition of rival platform OneLogin, Okta’s acquisition of Auth0, and Ping Identity buying up no-code identity and security orchestration platform Singular Key.