The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2012–2013
Meldium (YC W13) bets teams will swap password spreadsheets for managed logins
Seattle-built Meldium logged teams into 150+ shared apps without exposing passwords; a month before YC Demo Day, organizations up to 250 staff were using it.
Meldium
What the business is
Meldium made a browser extension that lets a small or mid-sized team share access to company apps: an admin stores credentials for roughly 150 services — GitHub, Salesforce, Box, MailChimp, Google Apps and more — and teammates are signed in automatically without ever typing or seeing passwords.
Starting capital：Bootstrapped by the three co-founders from August 2012; YC funding terms not disclosed in the source.
How it started
Meldium was founded in August 2012 in Seattle by Anton Vaynshtok, Bradley Buda and Boris Jabes — Amazon and Microsoft alumni — after they saw how differently large companies and startups handled shared accounts: big firms had fully secure sign-in systems while small teams ran their Twitter, Dropbox and LexisNexis logins on a shared spreadsheet. "We realized there has got to be some solution for people who can't spend $100 million on an IT organization, but still need more control over their app administration," Jabes said. The three bootstrapped and built the service before entering the Y Combinator W13 class.
What happened
Meldium enabled automatic logins for about 150 apps — including GitHub, Salesforce, Box, MailChimp and Google Apps — with freemium pricing: free for teams under five people and ten apps, then $29/month for up to 20 users and 20 apps, $79/month for 100 users and 50 apps, and $199/month for up to 250 users with unlimited apps. The founders credited YC's product and strategic input, plus the industry clout of the YC name, for accelerating clientele growth; by late February 2013, a full month before Demo Day, the service was used at a number of companies and organizations nationwide, one with as many as 250 staffers.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Meldium was founded in August 2012 by three Seattle-based Amazon and Microsoft alumni who had watched small teams run shared logins for Twitter, Dropbox, LexisNexis and other accounts on a spreadsheet. The service they built instead was a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox: an admin stored credentials for roughly 150 apps — GitHub, Salesforce, Box, MailChimp, Google Apps and more — and team members were signed in automatically, never typing or seeing the password themselves.
The company's bet was that teams would adopt a security layer built for how they actually operate rather than being pushed into a locked-down enterprise stack. Two mechanisms made that credible: a model that finds common ground across scores of SaaS apps so one interface handles all of them, and split-infrastructure cryptography that lets passwords be entered by an admin and used for logins but not extracted by ordinary users. "With this cryptography, the only thing that can come back out is the logged in account, not the credentials themselves," co-founder Bradley Buda said.
Meldium was freemium — free below five users and ten apps, then $29, $79 and $199 per month — and entered Y Combinator's W13 batch after bootstrapping. TechCrunch profiled the company on 2013-02-25, a month before Demo Day, when it was already used by companies and organizations nationwide, including one with roughly 250 staffers; the story drew 108 points and 49 comments on Hacker News.
What has to be true
- A real pain with a deadline: when someone left a team, an admin had to revoke access app by app, and the spreadsheet itself could walk out the door with the departing employee.
- Security without behavior change: users kept their apps and habits while the extension replaced the spreadsheet, so adoption did not require moving to a single-vendor stack.
- Cryptography as the product answer: because credentials could be used but not extracted, Meldium addressed the exact fear of a leaver taking the official Twitter account for one last ride.
What can be applied
Shared-password products win on revocation, not storage: the moment that sells is when leaving the team disables access in one click, not when credentials are merely kept tidy.
Aftermath
As of 2013-02-25 Meldium was live with customers across the country and was scheduled to graduate from Y Combinator's W13 batch the following month. TechCrunch described it as a well-made, thoughtful product that fits how groups already operate; the record stops there, at a full month before Demo Day, so later milestones — funding rounds, growth or an exit — are not covered by this source.
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