Yubico

Stina and Jakob Ehrensvärd founded Yubico in Stockholm in 2007, and the first YubiKey shipped the following year: a small USB stick that typed out a one-time password when you touched it, with no battery and no drivers. It presented itself as a keyboard, which is why it worked almost everywhere.

The big step came with Google, where Yubico helped design the U2F standard that the FIDO Alliance published in 2014. That grew into FIDO2 and WebAuthn, the basis of today's phishing-resistant login. Google later reported that account takeovers among its staff effectively stopped once everyone carried a physical key. Yubico has been listed in Stockholm since 2023.