Clef is Joining Twilio!

The Clef team is joining Twilio. For the last four years, the Clef team has been working to build better consumer identity tools. We believe that in an increasingly mobile world, our smartphones provide the tools to bridge who we are online with the people we are offline. To make that vision a reality, we know that every developer needs to have great tools to connect with users through their smartphones, and Twilio has absolutely been a leader in building those tools. We’re excited to join Twilio and add our expertise to products that operate at a massive scale.

We also focused on building a great company around a great security product. For us, that meant insuring that we were creating an inclusive culture that invited folks from a broad range of backgrounds to work at Clef. In the last few years, we open sourced our Employee Handbook focused on creating an inclusive workplace, participated in Project Include’s first batch of Startup Include, and created the TechEquity Collaborative in Oakland. It’s critical to every member of our team that we join a company that shares those values, and Twilio is one of very few companies who we think is already doing that work today.

I’m incredibly proud of the results we’ve been able to achieve a small team. The New York Times described logging in with Clef as “magical” and there are currently more than a million active installs on WordPress websites. The conversation about passwordless authentication has changed drastically since we started Clef in 2013. We’ve demonstrated the power of applying design thinking to strong security tools, and I believe that it’s had a profound impact on that conversation.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us throughout. It has been an incredible pleasure to come to work every day with the Clef team, who have built a value-driven company worth working for. We wouldn’t be here without our customers (especially some of our first cheerleaders — boom!) who have learned with us and helped us build a better product. It really is a very small Valley, and we’ve been fortunate to have incredible mentors, advisors, and investors to help guide us through every stage of building this business. Lastly, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this without my co-founders Mark and Jesse. There is no one who I would rather have shared this adventure with.

B Byrne
CEO, Clef