Who are we?
Prefactor was founded to solve the next generation of authentication and authorization challenges — where users aren’t just people, but also agents, APIs, and automation.
Legacy identity systems were built for static logins and manual approvals. They break when agents act autonomously, at scale, and across systems.
The commoditization of customer identity has left behind the hard part: how to manage identity when the user isn’t human — and how to do it without burning months of engineering time.
Prefactor gives you a new foundation: scoped, auditable, version-controlled identity for every user, human or not.
This isn’t just innovation. It’s infrastructure for the next era of software.
Backed by
Prefactor's journey
Prior to writing a line of code, we spoke with over 100 companies from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, USA and Canada from day 1 startups through to global, listed businesses.
Through validation we discovered:
50% of B2B software companies build their own user authentication
95% of B2B software companies build their own authorisation tools
As we refined our thesis it became clear that now was the time to build a platform tackling the problem of building a unified solution enabling seamless, highly customisable authentication and authorization flows for engineers.
Armed with this feedback and commitment from several international design partners and over 10 letters of intent, Prefactor were one of 8 investments Antler Australia made in the Aus12 cohort.
Prefactor launch the first iteration of the platform via a closed beta.
Our founders
CEO AND CO-FOUNDER
Matt Doughty
Matt is the CEO and co-founder of Prefactor. With 15 years of experience in sales and post sales at companies like Procore Technologies and Patsnap, he has been responsible for over $35m revenue across North America, Europe and APAC.
With a young family, Matt is regularly found in the great outdoors running after his two boys or drinking a coffee to recuperate.
CTO AND CO-FOUNDER
Simon Russell
Simon is the CTO and co-founder of Prefactor. His experience working with businesses including GreenSync, Dokio and iFlix has seen Simon lead technology organisations from the ground up. His design first principles and leadership has contributed to multiple venture backed rounds.
On the weekends, you'll most likely find Simon cycling in and around Melbourne, enjoying the natural beauty the area has to offer.
