Anon, a revolutionary developer platform empowering secure AI access and control to user accounts online, today announces $6.5M in funding and a power

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Anon, a revolutionary developer platform empowering secure AI access and control to user accounts online, today announces $6.5M in funding and a powerful toolkit that unlocks the full potential of AI applications. Fueled by investment from Union Square Ventures and Abstract Ventures (seed lead investors), as well as early support from Impatient Ventures and ex/ante (pre-seed lead investors), Anon is poised to transform the way developers build and deploy AI. Strategic angel investors in the round include Ryan Hoover (Founder, Product Hunt), Gokul Rajaram (early Google, Square, Doordash), Scott Belsky (founder of Behance; CPO at Adobe), and Amjad Masad (co-founder/CEO at Replit) backing their vision to become the “Integration Platform for the Internet” that provides interoperability between AI and end-user accounts. Imagine a world where ChatGPT doesn’t just answer your questions, but securely authenticates on behalf of end-users to send messages, book travel, and manage finances. The current landscape of AI applications is plagued by a critical bottleneck: authentication. A lack of available APIs for most sites limits the immense value AI could yield for end-users

As the notion of the AI agent begins to take hold, and more tasks will be completed without a human involved, it is going to require a new kind of authentication to make sure only agents with the proper approval can access particular resources. Anon, an early stage startup is helping developers add automated authentication in a safe and secure way.On Wednesday, the company announced a $6.5 million investment — and that the product is now generally available to all.The founders came up with the idea for this company out of necessity. Their first idea was actually building an AI agent, but CEO Daniel Mason, says they quickly came up against a problem around authentication – simply put, how to enter a username and password automatically and safely. “We kept running into this hard edge of customers wanting us to do X, but we couldn’t do X unless we had this delegated authentication system,” Mason told TechCrunch.He began asking around about how other AI startups were handling authentication, and found there weren’t really any good answers. “In fact, a lot of the solutions, people that were using, were actually quite a bit less secure. They were mostly inheriting authentication credentials from a user’s local machine or browser-based permissions,” he said.And as they explored this problem more in depth, they realized that this was in fact a better idea for a company than their original AI agent idea