Announcing Uno

At Uno, we’re making it safer and easier to use the internet. If you enjoy shaping early products, join the waitlist.

One of the main parts of being online is dealing with passwords. It’s the secret that represents our identity digitally, and grants access to everything like sensitive personal information, money, and relationships. Yet, keeping these services secure is painfully difficult. It’s understandable why it’s easy to cut corners like reusing passwords, constantly forgetting them, or never taking the time to upgrade our security with things like 2 factor authentication. We know we need good security for ourselves and yet, like flossing our teeth, it feels like a chore. (Side-note: if you floss daily, nice work!)

I learned the importance of this first hand. A few years ago, one of my emails got hacked. It had a compounding effect; the services I used most often were also being taken over through password resets. It was scary and felt like a violation of my privacy. As I began taking steps to recover my accounts, I noticed how technical and cumbersome security was. And the tools out there weren’t cutting it. Not to mention, as the internet becomes increasingly complex, the challenges of managing your identity are only going to be messier and more important to do at the same time.

Based on our experience of being online for decades, we’ve found that the access to more secure products and tech is only part of the solution. We also need to consider how people are interfacing with that technology. But the tools and practices we all should follow just aren’t designed for people to use easily.

This is why I started Uno. The problem needs to be solved through a design-lead approach. Our vision is to make the internet easier to use, starting with re-envisioning the password manager. We’re focusing on experiences that easily onboard people to better security, removing friction from the repetitive parts of the internet like authentication, making social recovery easy to use for anyone. In the future, we'll become the universal home for all parts of our identities that’s self-sovereign, alongside being trustfully authenticated to the right places.

This is a big problem to solve and can’t be done alone. To help, we’ve built a stellar team of individuals who know what it takes to build well-crafted and secure products at some of the most established companies around — Google, Lookout, Amazon, Aetna and other amazing folks who’ve done it before. We’re still adding a couple people to come join our small and mighty team, reach out.

Beyond the team, we’re lucky to be supported by an exceptional group of advisors and investors. We raised a seed round led by a16z and supported by a diverse group of operators, angels, and security folks who’ve built products we enjoy using like Lookout Security, Duo Security, Honey, Adobe, Discord, Google, Slack, Robinhood, Airbnb, Snap, Postmates, and many more.

We’re excited to bring you along the journey. We’ll be sharing more of our product, experiments, designs, thoughts going forward. If you’re someone who likes shaping early products and want to try out what we’ve been building, sign up here and we’ll get you going in the next couple days! And you can follow along the Uno journey on Twitter.

- On behalf of the Uno team, Parteek.