Breakout Startups #22- Fast
The company which wants to eliminate passwords from the Internet
“If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory.” — Sam Altman, President at Y Combinator
Hi,
This is Ankit here. In the 22nd Edition of Breakout Startups, we are profiling Fast, the company planning to eliminate passwords from the Internet.
What is a Breakout Job?
We, at Xpo Network, define a Breakout Job is that one role that puts you on the map. The best examples that hit my mind are Andrew Chen heading Growth at Uber, Erik Torenberg leading Community at Product Hunt.
What is Fast?
Fast is building the button for the world’s fastest login and checkout experience for the Internet. This can be easily added to any website for secure one-click login for all users.
The product supports 100% of users, authenticating through email, and doesn’t require users to have a Fast account.
If you want to have a demo of how the product works, here’s a good explainer from the website👇
Product
Fast currently enables a Stripe like integration for websites to enable one-click login and sign up for websites. The product has already integrated with a bunch of websites.
Check it out→ Fast - World's fastest login and checkout
Along with this, the company is planning to start Fast Pay which will enable users to pay with just a tap on any site, even on the first visit.
A Product like Fast can be very beneficial to businesses as it can help them in increasing sales conversions along with increasing the ease of the use for the customers.
Currently, Fast is available to install on any of the 33M+ websites running on any of these platforms.
Investors
Fast has raised a total of $2.5M in a Seed Round led by Jon Hammer(Investor in companies such as Robinhood, Collibra, TransferWise & others) of Index Ventures where other marquee ventures such as Kleiner Perkins, Global Founders Capital, Susa Ventures also participated.
Team
Domm Holland- Founder & CEO of Fast, Prominent figure in Australian Startup Ecosystem, Previously; Built an award-winning technology platform and business which dealt with more than $50M in transactions.
Allison Barr Allen- COO of Fast, Previously; Global Leadership Team at Uber.
Jon Amadei- Product at Fast, Previously; Square, Wish.
Market Landscape
Fast is solving a big pain point for both users and businesses which is having different usernames and passwords for every site they visit. Facebook and Google solve it through their OAuth Tool but they acquire all the user data in the lieu of doing this.
This is person essential factor that plays well for a product like Fast is that users don’t want to give away their data to Google and Facebook which are the current authorization tools used by a lot of websites.
Fast is committing to not owning any data related user’s identity which makes it a product to watch out😄
One of the most interesting reasons to be bullish on a company like Fast is the emergence of Frictionless Finance. In the past few years, we are seeing a number of fintech startups boom up who are enabling a seamless flow of money on the Internet. We have seen startups such as Stripe, Robinhood and several others.
The idea behind Frictionless finance is to enable to stress-free management of money by the users. It should be easy to pay, invest, shop, on the Internet. Read more about it here.
Fast is building the tool to ease the shopping experience on the Internet.
A good amount of Product, Security and Technical challenges lie in front of the company and they are assembling a world-class team to face them.
News
Along with this, the product has been generating great buzz in the tech circles.
The company’s most notable hire so far has been Allison Barr Allen, who joined as COO of Fast from Uber where she was a part of the Global Leadership Team.