SlickLogin’s three-person team announced the acquisition on the company’s Web site.
“Today we`re announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a company that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way,” SlickLogin’s three founders, Or Zelig, Eran Galili and Ori Kabeli said in a blogpost of the company’s website Sunday and listing its contact email as “Press@google.com.” The amount Google paid was not disclosed ,and Google had as of late Sunday, February 16, made no announcement itself.
The three only began developing their product last August, presented it at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco in September and officially formed the company in December. Zelig, the Tel Aviv-based company’s CEO; Galili, its vice president of technology; and Kabeli, who heads research and development, will be joining Google’s development center this week and become part of the company’s global security team.
Terms of the deal were not revealed, but the acquisition is said to be valued at “several million,” according to Geektime.
The company, which Israel National News reported has not yet released a commercial product, “develops technology that allows websites to generate nearly silent tones through a user’s computer speakers as a verification replacement for passwords. An app on the user’s nearby smartphone picks up the unique audio signal, analyzes it, and send it back to the site’s servers for login.”
And Haaretz reports that SlickLogin was just formed less than two months ago.
Since SlickLogin has neither a commercial product or customers, Google is purchasing the technology and the know-how of the founders. And, Haaratez explained, their knowledge comes from their days in the Israel Defense Forces. Although the team will continue developing the security technology, the SlickLogin product itself may not necessarily be adopted by Google.
“The technology could be used as a replacement for the traditional password or as part of a two-factor authentication, which is intended to reduce users’ vulnerability to online identity theft, phishing, and other scams by adding a second level of identity verification to an account log-in,” wrote CNET.
The company joins a small number of Israel-based companies that Google has acquired in recent years, including the spreadsheet company iRows in 2006, entertainment company LabPixies in 2010, and the $1.3 billion purchase of mapping service Waze last year.
