1Password

AgileBits of Toronto shipped 1Password for the Mac in 2006 and spent more than a decade as a profitable small company with no venture money. The turn came with the subscription service in 2017 and $200 million from Accel in 2019; the company has since traded under the product's name.

The technically interesting bit is the Secret Key: a random 128-bit key that lives only on the user's devices and is mixed with the master password during key derivation. Anyone who steals the server-side vaults needs both, so a weak password alone won't let them crack the vaults offline. That difference became very visible when LastPass lost its customers' vaults in 2022. Version 8 was rebuilt around a Rust core and Electron, to loud complaints from Mac users.