Sunnyvale, California · Founded 2019
OLOID.
Passwordless identity for the people who never sit at a desk.
Above: the OLOID wordmark, sized for a badge reader that has seen a thousand thumbs.
Passwordless identity for the people who never sit at a desk.
Above: the OLOID wordmark, sized for a badge reader that has seen a thousand thumbs.
It is the start of a hospital shift. A nurse walks up to a shared workstation that forty other people will touch today, glances at the camera, and is in. No sticky note under the keyboard. No "what was your first pet's name?" No call to a help desk three time zones away. That moment - boring, fast, forgettable - is exactly what OLOID has spent six years engineering.
OLOID is a Sunnyvale software company that does one unglamorous thing well: it lets frontline workers prove who they are without a password. Face, NFC badge, RFID card, a QR code on a tablet - whatever is already in their pocket or on the wall. The pitch is almost suspiciously simple, which is usually a sign someone has been staring at a hard problem for a long time.
Enterprise security has lavished a decade of attention on the laptop. Single sign-on, hardware keys, biometrics baked into every login - all of it built for someone with an assigned device and a quiet desk. Lovely. The trouble is that most of the planet's workforce doesn't fit that picture.
There are roughly 1.8 billion deskless workers - on factory lines, hospital floors, retail backrooms, pharmaceutical clean rooms, contact centers. They share devices. They share doors. They wear gloves. They are, in the polite language of IT, "hard to provision." So they get handed the oldest tool in the drawer: a shared password on a laminated card, or a four-digit PIN everyone on the shift knows by heart.
The market everyone benchmarks but few actually build for. OLOID built for it.
OLOID was founded in 2019 by Mohit Garg, Madhu Madhusudhanan, and Shankar Agarwal. Garg is a second-time founder - he previously co-founded MindTickle and helped take it to unicorn status - so he had earned the right to chase a problem that most investors would politely describe as "infrastructure-heavy." Hardware companies sell readers and turnstiles. OLOID's bet was the opposite: leave the hardware alone.
The wager was that enterprises already own the badge readers, the doors, the proximity cards. What they lack is a software layer that turns all that legacy metal into a modern, phishing-resistant identity system - one that speaks FIDO2 and passkeys on one end and a twenty-year-old door controller on the other. Build that bridge, and you don't have to rip anything out.
Serial founder; previously co-founded MindTickle. Now fixated on identity for frontline teams.
Leads the platform and the biometric AI under the hood.
Runs the India organization that powers much of the engineering.
What started as contactless biometrics has grown into a platform. Each piece solves a different version of the same question: is this really you, and should you be allowed through?
FIDO2-compliant access via face, NFC, RFID badges, QR codes and proximity cards - for shared devices and physical doors alike.
Establishes employee identity in real time during help-desk requests, retiring the easily-social-engineered security question.
No-code / low-code automation of identity processes with pre-built connectors to HRIS, SSO and physical access systems.
Tablet-based, contactless clock-in using facial recognition, QR codes and NFC. No buddy-punching.
The newest move is into agentic identity. In 2025 OLOID launched AURA, an AI identity-assurance agent aimed squarely at the help desk - the place most breaches actually start. When an employee asks to reset a password or unlock an account, AURA verifies them with risk-based biometric checks instead of trivia. It now sits inside the Workday Marketplace and integrates with Workday's Agent System of Record.
A passwordless story for frontline workers is easy to tell and hard to sell - the buyers are skeptical, the compliance bar is brutal, and "it works in the demo" means nothing on a loading dock. So the more interesting evidence is the logo wall. OLOID's publicly referenced customers and design partners read like a tour of the physical economy: Dell, DoorDash, Flex, Kraft Heinz, Tyson Foods, Honeywell, PepsiCo, Quest Diagnostics, General Electric, Takeda.
The compliance stack backs it up where it counts for regulated industries: SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 30107-3 for biometric anti-spoofing, and EPCS certification for prescribing workflows in healthcare. Investors with a vested interest in identity - Okta and Honeywell among them - put money in, which is a useful tell.
Not a moonshot raise - a deliberate one. Identity infrastructure rewards patience over fireworks.
"Enabling a unified identity and frictionless access for deskless workers."
OLOID's mission, in its own wordsOLOID frames its goal as accelerating the path to a passwordless future, "especially for frontline workers and shared devices." The qualifier is the entire company. Plenty of vendors will sell you passwordless for knowledge workers. Far fewer will design for gloved hands, no email address, and a device touched by the next person in ninety seconds.
There is a quieter ambition underneath it. If you can establish a trusted identity for a worker who has none of the usual anchors - no corporate laptop, no personal device on the network, no inbox - you can extend almost anything to them: secure access, time tracking, provisioning, even the right to approve a high-risk action. Identity becomes the platform, not the feature.
The next few years of enterprise security will be defined by a new and slightly unsettling question: when an AI agent acts on a worker's behalf, who exactly authorized it? OLOID's AURA and its announced FIL - frontline human-in-the-loop - are early attempts to put a verified human in that loop, with policy-based risk checks before an autonomous agent does something irreversible.
It is a logical extension of the original bet. The company started by proving a frontline worker is real at a door. Now it wants to prove a human is real before an agent resets a credential or approves a transaction. Same question, higher stakes. With 86 people and $23M behind it, OLOID is not the biggest name in identity - but it has picked the part of the market that the biggest names kept skipping.
Back at that hospital workstation: the nurse is already three tasks deep into the shift. She never thought about the login, because that was the point. The password didn't get stronger. It disappeared. OLOID's whole wager is that this is what good security looks like - not a wall you notice, but a door that quietly knows you.