Duo of CSE Alums Form and Grow Security Company in Ann Arbor

Serial entrepreneur Dug Song (CS BS 1997) and recent alum Jon Oberheide (CSE PhD 2011) founded security firm Duo Security in early 2010 and have rapidly grown their company to serve over 500 customers in 40+ countries around the world. The company is located in Ann Arbor’s Tech Brewery business incubator, and the majority of the firm’s employees are U-M alums.

Duo Security provides hosted two-factor authentication service, which is technology that enables users to secure their logins and transactions using smartphones to prevent fraud and account takeover. Duo Security’s hosted two-factor authentication service brings strong, scalable security to organizations of any size, and their architecture provides centralized management, self-service enrollment, and interactive secondary login through an intuitive web interface, eliminating the high costs, complexity, and confusion associated with traditional two-factor authentication systems.

The Duo Mobile smartphone application is free and available on all major smartphone platforms, and lets users easily generate passcodes without the cost and hassle of hardware tokens. The company also supports older devices such as cellphones and landlines, as well as hardware tokens.

Duo Security is poised for additional rapid growth, having received a $5M Series A round early in 2012 led by Google Ventures and True Ventures to continue to grow the company in Ann Arbor. The company joins security industry heavyweights Arbor Networks – co-founded by Prof. Farnam Jahanian and G. Robert Malan (MSE PhD CSE ’96 ‘00) and at which Song previously served as Chief Security Architect – and Barracuda Networks (founded by Dean Drako, BS EE, 1987) as the third in a trio of security firms with U-M roots and a strong presence in Ann Arbor.