Futurae: The Venture Leader Technolgy securing digital identities with AI

16.03.2026 11:00, Rita Longobardi

Meet Claudio Marforio, co-founder of Futurae. The security startup protects customers of large enterprises with strong phishing-resistant authentication from sophisticated online fraud. Claudio and the other nine Swiss National Technology Team members will fly to Silicon Valley in April.

Name: Claudio Marforio
Location: Zurich
Nationality: Italian
Graduated from: ETH Zurich (PHD)
Prior role: N/A
Founding team members: Sandra Tobler, Nikos Karapanos, Claudio Marforio
Number of employees: 65
Money raised: CHF 15M

What does your product or solution do, and what makes it unique?
Futurae provides secure, enterprise-grade customer authentication and identity orchestration for banks, fintechs, and large digital platforms. Our platform unifies passkeys, MFA, risk-based authentication, and user-trust signals into one simple integration, reducing fraud while improving conversion. What makes Futurae unique is our deep security pedigree (ETH Zurich), our scalable cloud architecture trusted by millions of users, and our next-gen approach that brings agentic AI delegation into CIAM to automate identity decisions with unprecedented accuracy and resilience.
 

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What trend or shift in your industry is currently creating the biggest opportunity for you?
The convergence of AI, fraud automation, and regulatory pressure is forcing enterprises to rethink identity. Traditional CIAM and MFA stacks can’t keep up with real-time risk, cross-channel attacks, or the user experience expectations. This shift creates a major opportunity for Futurae: companies now need unified authentication, risk intelligence, and automated decisioning in a single platform. Our architecture and security DNA position us to lead this transition from static user authentication to dynamic, AI-driven identity orchestration.

How did the idea for your startup originate?
Futurae began during my PhD research at ETH Zurich, where we studied how to make strong authentication both more secure and more usable. What started as research into next-generation MFA quickly revealed a much bigger need: enterprises were struggling with fragmented, outdated authentication stacks. That insight led us to build a cohesive, high-security authentication platform that unifies MFA, passkeys, risk signals, and orchestration, designed from day one for real-world scale and usability.

Which market are you addressing, and what potential do you see for your startup in that market?
Futurae is shaping the future of digital identity, combining AI-driven authentication, continuous identity, and dynamic authorization. Its platform helps companies automate decisions, reduce friction, and protect users at scale, positioning Futurae as a next-generation standard in the evolving CIAM market.

What impact do you want your technology to have five years from now?
In five years, we want Futurae to redefine how digital trust is built. Our goal is for enterprises across the World to rely on Futurae as the intelligence layer that automates identity decisions, securely, transparently, and with minimal friction for users. We want to make agentic AI delegation, risk-aware authentication, and fractional identities the new normal, enabling companies to stop fraud before it happens and let users move through digital services seamlessly. Ultimately, our impact should be measured by a safer digital ecosystem where identity is no longer a bottleneck, but a competitive advantage.

What major challenges have you faced so far?
As a European cybersecurity startup, we face funding limits, scarce specialized talent, a fragmented market, and long enterprise sales cycles. Despite this, we’ve built a resilient, enterprise-ready platform trusted by millions, turning these challenges into lasting advantages.

What motivates you on tough days?
What keeps me going on tough days is knowing I’m surrounded by a team I genuinely enjoy working with, smart, committed people who make even hard problems energizing. I’m also driven by the challenge itself: in cybersecurity and identity, there’s always a new frontier to push, a system to improve, or a threat to outsmart. And above all, I’m motivated by the responsibility we carry: building technology that protects millions of users and strengthens Europe’s digital resilience. That sense of purpose matters.

Why did you decide to join the Venture Leaders Roadshow, and what are you most excited about?
I joined the Venture Leaders Roadshow because it offers a unique combination of reach and momentum: direct access to top-tier investors, potential customers, and a global network that can accelerate Futurae’s next phase of growth. I’m equally excited about working closely with a cohort of exceptional founders, sharing insights, sharpening each other’s thinking, and pushing our companies forward together. And honestly, I’m also looking forward to having fun while working hard; the best breakthroughs often happen in exactly that mix.