AccessGrid raises $4.4M to help turn phones into key fobs

Austen Bunsen had a lot of free time after his company QuickNode reached a certain size. That company, a blockchain developer platform, was founded in 2017 and has since raised about $60 million in funding, according to Pitchbook.

Then Bunsen started thinking about the fact that people might want to open their doors with their iPhones. “I finally met with some people at Apple and they decided to make a bet that I could help further their goals to enable every company to bring the power of Apple Wallet to their doorstep,” Bunsen told TechCrunch.

Bunsen left Quicknode last October and decided to work on his new ideas: accessgridwhich creates APIs that companies can use to manage digital key fobs directly between Apple and Google’s wallet platforms.

“It works when your iPhone is locked, automatically syncs to your watch and, in the case of the iPhone, works even when your phone dies,” Bunsen said. The company officially launched in April, and on Tuesday, announced a $4.4 million seed round led by Harlem Capital.

Right now, Bunsen says, the access control industry is stuck in the late 1990s. Many systems must operate on-premises and be disconnected from the cloud, or use unencrypted communications and ID card technology that can be easily hacked.

“AccessGrid replaces this with an API that uses encrypted payloads to issue unclonable credentials that can be instantly revoked via the cloud,” Bunsen said. “We think it’s time to bring physical security measures up to the 2025 standard.”

Cybersecurity is a big concern for such a product, but Bunsen says the company uses “military-grade” encryption as well as dual-encryption. “We use multi-factor authentication for all server access, and other standard cybersecurity practices,” he continued.

Bunsen was developing the product alone, along with three other co-founders when he created QuickNode, and described his fundraising journey as a “distraction”.

“Our objective is to serve the customer, so anything that isn’t is a distraction to us,” he said.

Nevertheless, Bunsen met Henri Pierre-Jacques, managing partner of Harlem Capital, through some friends in Miami. Other investors in the round come from Bunsen’s time at Quicknode, such as Marel Evans from Exceptional Capital and Maya Bakhai from Spice Capital. AccessGrid also participated in the HF0 accelerator and received its first check from the program.

AccessGrid is going up against other startups in this space, including SwiftConnect and Sharry. But Bunsen says his startup is different because it doesn’t sell service contracts or middle-ware to talk to existing hardware devices. “We’re a ‘pure play,’ API-only,” Bunsen said, adding that it’s a developer platform, not an end-user app with API features.

The new capital will be used to build app security as well as new products and features. The company hopes to expand into automobile products soon.

Eventually, Bunsen wants to upgrade every access control reader in the U.S. “Our hope is to create a world where everything you normally have a key opens because of your proximity,” he said. “You’ll never lose your key because it’s always with you. We want to make the places you’re in faster, safer and more seamless, for people and machines alike.”