Foundation, a US hardware security company, has raised 6.4 million dollars in a new funding round and made its Passport Prime device generally available. The round, led by Fulgur Ventures with participation from Arche Capital and Polychain Capital, brings total funding to 16.5 million dollars. Passport Prime is now sold for 349 dollars.
The company positions Passport Prime as a dedicated security device for what it calls human authority over high-stakes digital actions. It is built around a single piece of hardware that consolidates several functions traditionally split across separate devices: FIDO security key for passwordless and phishing-resistant sign-in, storage of two-factor authentication seeds, an encrypted vault for keys and secrets, a Bitcoin hardware wallet, and 50 GB of encrypted on-device file storage. The device runs Foundation’s KeyOS, which is also offered to outside developers through an SDK so third-party applications can target the secure hardware.
The pitch the company makes for the AI agent era turns on where approvals happen. “That question cannot be answered by the same computer running the agent. It has to be answered on dedicated hardware,” said Zach Herbert, Foundation Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer, framing Passport Prime as a separate root of trust for authorizing actions that an autonomous agent proposes. Ken Carpenter, Foundation Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer, described the division of responsibility as “Passport Prime secures the keys. You set the policies. KeyOS enforces them.”
The device sits at the intersection of FIDO authentication, enterprise signing, and the newer category of AI agent authorization. Existing FIDO security keys focus on logging a person in; Passport Prime extends that pattern toward signing arbitrary high-value transactions and approving the actions of software agents acting on a user’s behalf. The encrypted file storage and 2FA-seed vault sit alongside that, replacing several single-purpose tools on a key ring.
The first external developer shipping on KeyOS is Cake Wallet, which Foundation said is bringing cold storage to its user base of about one million. The KeyOS SDK, documentation, and a simulator are available to developers at foundation.xyz/dev, with a Passport Prime app store launch slated for the end of the second quarter of 2026.
Sources: GlobeNewswire
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
