For some employees, passwords are the scourge of modern work.

Almost nobody heeds the tip from experts to never use the same password for several services.

Because with countless online accounts at home and in the office, nobody can remember many different passwords.

An alternative to sticky notes on the screen is to use a program that remembers the identifiers.

Password managers are already included in many Internet browsers, but they also exist as a separate program.

The solutions in browsers are often considered insecure because hackers can read them with special software.

That's why standalone password manager vendors are thriving.

Bastian Benrath

Editor in Business.

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A financing round announced by the Canadian provider 1 Password on Wednesday illustrates the potential that investors see for these companies. Venture capitalists like Iconiq Growth and Tiger Global are putting $620 million into the company, giving it a $6.8 billion valuation. According to 1 Password, this is the largest round of financing ever raised by a Canadian start-up. In addition to the institutional investors, a number of celebrities also took part personally, such as Linkedin boss Jeff Weiner, the musician Justin Timberlake and the actress Scarlett Johansson.

1 Password allows its users to store both passwords and copies of important documents - ID cards, passports, driver's licenses - in an encrypted cloud. The company itself does not have access to these, as CEO Jeff Shiner explains to the FAZ: "We are not technically able to see what services a user uses and what he has stored in his password vault."

The company also offers such storage for business customers. In addition to a safe place for passwords and business secrets, they also receive professional tools to make them accessible to the right employees and to keep others away from them. Shiner points to a 1-Password study that found 77 percent of software developers can still access sensitive data from their former employer even after they leave a company. "We want to bring convenience and safety together," says Shiner.

The company claims to be profitable. 1 Password intends to use the venture capital raised to hire more employees and expand internationally. In the business customer segment, Germany is the third most important market for 1 Password after the USA and Great Britain. A branch is therefore to be set up in this country this year. The company already hosts some of the data entrusted to it in Germany. For this it uses the data center of the Amazon cloud division AWS in Frankfurt.

In terms of personnel, the company has tripled in the past two years from 177 to almost 600 employees, and another doubling is to follow.

In addition, Shiner also holds out the prospect of acquisitions, for example of companies that develop technologies for passwordless login.

But we are also open in other directions.

"We don't take anything off the table," says Shiner.

However, the money does not have to be spent immediately.

Rather, 1 Password also wants to create a capital cushion in order to be able to make “big bets” on important technologies.