Auston Bunsen had a lot of free time after his company QuickNode grew to a certain size. This company, a blockchain development platform, was founded in 2017 and went on to raise around $60 million in funding, according to PitchBook.
Bunsen then started thinking about how people might like to unlock their doors with their iPhones. “I finally met with some people at Apple and they decided to bet that I could help them achieve their goals to enable every company to bring the power of Apple Wallet to their door,” Bunsen told TechCrunch.
Bunsen left QuickNode last October and decided to work on his new idea: AccessGrid, which creates APIs that businesses can use to manage digital keychains directly within Apple and Google’s wallet platforms.
“It works when your iPhone is locked, automatically syncs with your watch, and in the case of the iPhone, works even if your phone is dead,” Bunsen said. The company officially launched in April and announced a $4.4 million seed round on Tuesday led by Harlem Capital.
Right now, Bunsen says, the access control industry is stuck in the late 1990s. Many systems must run on-premises and are disconnected from the cloud, or use unencrypted communications and easily hackable ID card technologies.
“AccessGrid replaces this with an API that issues unclonable credentials using encrypted payloads that can be instantly revoked via the cloud,” Bunsen said. “We believe it is time to bring physical security systems up to 2025 standards.”
Cybersecurity is a major concern for a product like this, but Bunsen says the company uses “military-grade” encryption as well as double encryption. “We use multi-factor authentication for all server access and other standard cybersecurity practices,” he continued.
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Bunsen is building this product alone, unlike the time he built QuickNode with three other co-founders, and described his fundraising journey as a “distraction.”
“Serving customers is our goal, so anything other than that is a distraction to us,” he said.
Bunsen nevertheless met Henri Pierre-Jacques, managing partner of Harlem Capital, through some friends in Miami. Other investors participating in the round came from Bunsen’s days at QuickNode, such as Marell Evans of Exceptional Capital and Maya Bakhai of Spice Capital. AccessGrid also participated in the HF0 accelerator and received its first check from the program.
AccessGrid takes on other startups in this space, including SwiftConnect and Sharry. But Bunsen says his startup is different because it doesn’t sell service contracts or middleware to communicate with existing hardware devices. “We are a pure play, API only,” Bunsen said, adding that it is a development platform and not an end-user application with API capabilities.
The new capital will be used to continue strengthening the security of the application, as well as for new products and features. The company hopes to soon expand into the automotive products sector.
Eventually, Bunsen wants to upgrade all access control readers in the United States. “Our hope is to create a world where everything you normally need a key for opens just because you’re nearby,” he said. “You’ll never lose your key because it’s always with you. We want to make access to the places you belong faster, safer and smoother, for people and machines alike.”
