Google acquired SlickLogin, an early-stage Israeli startup that had been developing alternative web-login options, the company announced Sunday. Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.
Started by three graduates from the Israel Defense Forces, SlickLogin was working on a way to let users log in to particular websites on their computer by holding up their phones in front of it. The startup, which was less than 6 months old, had yet to release a commercial product or raise funding.
"We set out to improve security while still making it simple for people to log in," SlickLogin's founders wrote in a statement on its website. "Today we're announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a company that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way."
A Google spokesperson confirmed the acquisition.
The SlickLogin team will join Google's research-and-development center in Israel, where they will be part of an existing team working on security and authentication technology, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Google has been actively involved in the Israeli tech space since 2005, making its biggest startup acquisition there last year with the purchase of Waze. The search giant currently has about 450 employees, mostly engineers, in Israel.