The role of the password. How the startup StackBob collected accesses and passwords from 300,000 services in one place and what problems it can solve for businesses

In addition, onboarding employees also requires connecting their accounts to a number of services, and being able to do it all at once in one place significantly saves admins time and, as a result, their employers' money.

These and not only these problems are designed to be solved by the startup StackBob, which shone brightly during the pitching at IT Arena 2025 this year. It took third place in the startup battle and took home a $5,000 prize from the organizers, and also received a special prize of $7,000 from Linkos Group and Vector as the most interesting startup of this year’s competition.

In the startup’s presentation, the audience was «introduced» to an imaginary IT administrator named Bob, and StackBob co-founder Ole Swede revealed that Bob spends over 500 hours of his working time each year managing access to numerous applications and licensed products. The company where the imaginary Bob works could potentially lose up to $100,000 per year, as 84% ​​of medium-sized companies manage employee access to software manually.

StackBob automatically pulls all applications and users into one centralized directory, managing their passwords and access levels. This IAM product can already integrate with over 300,000 applications, and such integration occurs in a matter of hours. StackBob is currently seeking $2 million to scale up by early next year. So far, most of the startup’s clients are technology companies with 100 to 500 employees.

On the sidelines of IT Arena 2025, dev.ua spoke with the startup’s CEO and co-founder Ole Shved to understand how it all started, how their product works, and how many customers they have already managed to attract. All this and more in a blitz interview with the co-founder.

— How did the idea for your product come about? Was it personal experience, market research, or some kind of epiphany, like in the movies?

— We came up with this idea together with my co-founder Yaroslav Rozum. Before that, we both worked in a number of B2B companies, and this problem appeared in many of them. I mean managing employee access to all products used by the company.

Do we use such a product? Does anyone have access to it? How do we get there? These are very typical questions from employees.

Or when you say goodbye to someone under certain circumstances, and then six months later you realize, wow, we forgot to remove their access. Especially if they work for a competitor and can see all our data. These are actually pretty common things that happen everywhere.

But we saw this especially acutely in our previous startup Ad-Lib.io, which we joined at an early stage and helped it exit for $100 million in three years (at the end of 2021, it was acquired for the indicated amount by the Finnish company Smartly — Ed.). We grew very quickly there, and I was the product manager and built the entire team. We grew from two to more than 35 people in the development team, and during this rapid growth, this problem appeared and proved to be quite acute. So after the exit of Ad-Lib.io, my co-founder and I decided that this is the problem that we will now solve for other companies. And so StackBob appeared.

— How many people are working on the development of the startup? What are your plans for attracting funding?

— Currently, there are about 15 people working on the project. We have been on the market for three years, and we started as a Bootstrap company. In 2023, we got into the Techstars acceleration program, and this was our first investment money — $120,000. After that, there were also various programs from the European Union, Seeds of Bravery, and Google for Startups. In total, we raised about $350,000 in outside money.

But the main measure is Bootstrap. We haven’t raised all the rounds yet, but we plan to raise $2 million for expansion next year.

— How many clients do you have now?

— We do not publicly disclose this information, but these are about 50 companies — from small startups to organizations with several thousand employees.

These are primarily technology companies, retail, and any other companies that use a variety of software on a large scale and have many different software applications. Actually, this creates a problem for them.

Even if you are a small company of 15 people, managing passwords and access to 50 different products you use is difficult. For example, if you are a technology startup.

When you have 1,500 people, but, for example, 20 different products, it’s still difficult, because you have a lot of employees. Some of them come to work, some go. And even if these are employees who don’t have access to many software products, because, conditionally, they work in a warehouse, they still have some work e-mail or other tools, and there can be a lot of these people. So this problem exists equally in both technological and non-technological companies.

— Is your product interesting only for businesses, or, theoretically, also for government agencies or non-profit organizations?

— We actually receive requests from various organizations and from IT resellers that work with the state, and IT consultants. And we know that this problem also exists in state bodies.

We are currently working with one partner on the Ukrainian specification, which is needed to sell our product to government agencies. There is a special state certification there, which is needed so that government organizations in Ukraine can use it. So yes, you are absolutely right, this problem exists both in government agencies and in the education sector, for example. We have partners from America, with whom we are also currently in a tender — this is the Public Schools system. These are schools in one of the states for 40,000 people, and this is our potential largest contract so far. But, as I said, we are in the tender and have not won it yet.

— Can you tell me a little more about how it all works technically?

— The uniqueness of our product is that we do not use traditional API protocols to integrate all your apps that you want to manage. This is exactly what traditional solutions on the market do.

We use AI agents that automate this through the browser. Because it’s browser automation in the cloud, and as a result, we can integrate any product like this. The integration process itself is very simple: you simply invite the agent by email to the products you want him to manage for you.

Next, it collects all the information about what accounts you have in each of these applications, what access levels they have, what licenses were issued, how much it costs, when and who last used them.

And here, in addition to the security factor, there is also an efficiency component. We help you find inactive accounts, inactive licenses and delete them so that you don’t waste money on something you don’t actually use.

— What about this issue that StackBob itself seems to be becoming the manager of quite sensitive information in the form of huge data arrays from various passwords?

— Customer data that is in the platform is encrypted and is located on Cloud servers. And our traditional setup is exactly the Cloud service, everything is located there. In addition, we use the appropriate AWS infrastructure and all the best practices for data storage and encryption. That is, our employees do not have access to this data.

Each client’s data is stored separately, it is not mixed with the data of other clients. If legally, then, of course, we have an end user agreement, which spells out all the rules for using the product and the responsibilities of the parties. But this also applies to any other product that works in this industry — this is a fairly typical situation.

For large companies and large enterprises, there is an option to organize what is called an on-premise setup: when the deployment of our service and our agents can be carried out on the company’s own servers. Then they are independently responsible for their security.

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