Multifactor acquires Keypo to accelerate zero-trust security for AI agents
2026-06-01
Authentication has always been a 99% invisible problem: we all interact with it constantly, but the underlying technology is complex and opaque enough that most people don't understand how it works, let alone how to build it. Agent authentication is even more so. The number of teams independently building cryptographic, zero-trust infrastructure for AI agents is small. Small enough that when we meet one, we pay attention.
Since our founding, Multifactor's mission has been to build a zero-trust foundation for secure, revocable, fine-grained sharing of online accounts with humans and AI agents alike. Today, we're proud to share that Multifactor has acquired Keypo, Inc. to accelerate our roadmap toward that vision. Keypo's founder, Dave Blumenfeld, is staying on as Multifactor's Founding Engineer, and will work to integrate Keypo's technology and research into Multifactor's platform in the coming months.
Keypo was co-founded by Dave Blumenfeld and Kerem Atalay in 2024 with a focus on building programmable encryption technologies. Before co-founding Keypo, Kerem was the co-founder and CTO of Yuga Labs, where he led the engineering of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and other flagship NFT projects. Prior to co-founding Keypo, Dave spent ten years in the defense industry as an ASIC designer. More recently, he founded Studio 256, a Web3 consulting agency whose entertainment-industry clients include Snoop Dogg, Michael Mann, and Baron Davis. It was this consulting work that surfaced a recurring problem: every approach to distributing premium content, blockchain-based or otherwise, eventually required some kind of trusted middleman.
Keypo's SDK uses smart contracts to enforce access control, distributed key management (via Lit Protocol) to handle encryption and decryption, and decentralized storage (via Filecoin) to remove the server from the equation entirely. The result is what Keypo calls programmable encryption: data that knows who is allowed to read it and enforces those rules itself, with no platform to trust and no server to maintain.
Over the past year, Keypo's focus narrowed onto the exact problem we founded Multifactor to solve. Keypo started in media, then in agents, and ultimately landed on authentication and security for AI agents, the most important and most underserved problem in cybersecurity today. They arrived from the same first principles we did, with a background in applied cryptography, trusted hardware, and agent security that matches our research roadmap point for point.
As Multifactor's Founding Engineer, Dave will be working on Checkpoint, our solution for secure, revocable, fine-grained sharing of online accounts with humans and AI agents alike. The product is built on a foundation of Trusted Execution Environments and is moving toward an increasingly locally-attested, zero-trust architecture. Dave's work at Keypo on secure enclaves and programmable access control accelerates that roadmap directly. In the handful of weeks he's already been on the team, the project has moved faster than at any other point this year. More broadly, Keypo's technology and research become part of Multifactor's growing library of zero-trust primitives, alongside MFKDF2 and Switchboard.
For Keypo's existing users, the iOS and MacOS app will keep working on your devices, and because it runs 100% locally, anyone who purchased the one-time "Unlimited Secrets" upgrade keeps full functionality. New downloads will be discontinued after a 90-day in-app notice, and the remaining portions of the Keypo codebase will be open-sourced as part of this transition, so the community can continue to build on it and self-host. Thank you to everyone who supported the project.
Keypo's research, paired with Dave's engineering depth as Founding Engineer, moves us closer to what we set out to build: a zero-trust foundation that is cryptographically guaranteed, not just trusted. The agentic era is going to need exactly this kind of convergence between programmable encryption, secure hardware, and provably secure protocols, and we're excited to be building it together.
We're redefining zero-trust — so you can protect your accounts with confidence.
Identity is your first and last line of defense, and the root cause of most application security breaches. Multifactor's provably secure zero-trust solutions cryptographically guarantee that only authorized users can access sensitive data, turning identity into your greatest asset in the fight against cyber threats. Learn more about our research, or reach out to explore working together.
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