Clef was a

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

-based technology company, known for developing a

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...

that created a

two-factor authentication Multi-factor authentication (MFA; two-factor authentication, or 2FA) is an electronic authentication method in which a user is granted access to a website or Application software, application only after successfully presenting two or more distin ...

for websites. It allowed users to access sites with a single login password management service which stores

encrypted In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plain ...

passwords in private accounts. It had a standard verification method that requires access to data on the mobile phone to confirm the user's identity. The application required a Wi-Fi or mobile network, and the user could log in by scanning the computer screen with their phone.

History

Clef was founded in 2013 by Mark Hudnall, B. Byrne and Jesse Pollak. It raised $1.6 million in seed funding in November 2014. Clef integrated with many websites and

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

, including

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

. On March 17, 2017, Clef announced they would no longer support the plugin after June 6, 2017; Clef was acquired by Authy, another 2FA service, which later got acquired by

Twilio Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communic ...

References

Companies based in San Francisco Mobile applications {{Mobile-software-stub