The first version of 1Password was not called 1Password. It was 1Passwd, and it was supposed to take three months.
That is how the company describes it: a quick side project, built by two friends who were tired of remembering passwords. Dave Teare and Roustem Karimov were colleagues in corporate software, building websites for their day jobs. Both had recently moved to the Mac, and the tool they wrote for themselves was a Mac app. In 2005 they founded AgileBits, and on June 18, 2006 the first release went out.
The next fourteen years are the part that nobody in venture capital tends to hear about.
They are private people, and the story that survives is about what they did: a pair who left the corporate path and decided to strike out on their own. Sara Teare and Natalia Karimova are also named as co-founders, and the two women were central to running the early company.
The next fourteen years are the part that nobody in venture capital tends to hear about. AgileBits did not raise a cent from outsiders. The product grew by being good: version 7 introduced a subscription in 2016-2018, Travel Mode arrived in 2017, and Jeff Shiner joined as CEO in 2012. The first outside investment came in November 2019, when Accel put in US$200M, reportedly its largest single cheque at the time.
Then the numbers jumped. A US$100M round at a US$2B valuation came in 2021. In January 2022 a US$620M Series C led by Iconiq Growth set the value at US$6.8B, with Ryan Reynolds, Robert Downey Jr. and Justin Timberlake among individual backers.
The trade-off of being a password company is that your mistakes are public. In 2017 Cloudflare's Cloudbleed bug raised alarms, and a German research institute found flaws in the Android app, which were fixed. Removing local vault storage in version 8 in 2021 angered loyal users. In 2023 a customer-support incident at Okta touched 1Password, which said no user data was compromised.
By September 2023 annual recurring revenue passed US$250M, and in November 2025 David Faugno, the CEO, told CNBC it was above US$400M and that an IPO in 2026 or 2027 was under consideration.
What a founder can take from it is that a three-month side project can be a company if it fixes something you personally hate. The two men who built it did not wait for permission or capital. They shipped for a niche, the Mac, and let customers pay for the next fourteen years of work.