An identity security startupFirst product
From a first product to a Series B.
We helped the founders build a platform that gives workloads and AI agents verifiable identities in place of static secrets. It now runs in Global 2000 enterprises.
Product engineering and strategic advisory
We build the software other companies cannot afford to get wrong.
Trust and identity providers, cloud providers, AI startups and financial technology companies bring us the work where a mistake becomes an outage, an incident or an audit finding.
Track record
Our open source is downloaded over 900 million times a month.
Software 80,000 people use to sign and authenticate every month.
First products for startups that went on to raise funding and be acquired.
A team that has run certificate authorities, shipped platform security and helped write industry standards.
Our clients
- Three of the largest public certificate authorities
- One of the largest cloud providers in the world
- A global networking and security vendor
- Venture-backed startups in identity, AI and finance
Client work
Companies bring us in when the product itself is on the line.
Much of our work is confidential, so we describe the engagements without the names and arrange reference calls on request.
An AI lending startupBuild to acquisition
Built with us, then acquired by a global credit rating agency.
We helped build a product that uses AI to organize the documents behind a commercial loan. The company was acquired in 2024.
One of the largest cloud providers, a global networking and security vendor, and two of the largest public certificate authorities
We helped each of them design and deliver products in certificates, identity, encryption and key management.
One of the oldest public certificate authorities
We helped the company rethink its processes and products during a crisis that threatened its core business.
Ventures
Software we built for ourselves.
When we keep meeting the same problem, we build the product. Some stay inside Peculiar Ventures, and some have grown into companies of their own.
Independent companies we started
Goodkey
Every credential across your organization in one place, with nothing to rewrite.
Goodkey is where your organization issues, holds and governs the credentials that people, devices, agents and workloads rely on to prove who they are. Passkeys, certificates, tokens and signing keys live in one inventory, and they appear to existing software as the credential stores it already understands.
Visit GoodkeyForgeIQx
The reasoning layer for highly regulated industries.
ForgeIQx keeps regulatory requirements, policy commitments, code and operational reality in continuous alignment. When a regulation, a policy or a piece of evidence changes, it works out what is affected and surfaces the gaps with a reasoning path an auditor can trace, and people make the final call.
Visit Systematic ReasoningMartini Security
STIR/SHAKEN certificates in minutes, so people can trust a phone call again.
Martini Security is a certificate authority for telephone service providers. It issues the STIR/SHAKEN certificates that the robocall rules require, renews them automatically, and includes call signing and verification, so compliance becomes a routine part of running the network.
Visit Martini SecurityPeculiar Ventures products
Fortify
Smart cards, security tokens and certificates in every major browser.
Fortify connects web applications to the smart cards, security tokens and certificate stores on a person's own computer, so people can enroll for certificates, sign and authenticate without leaving the browser. Certificate authorities and trust service providers build it into their portals.
Visit FortifyHancock
Signatures and approvals for contracts that have to hold up later.
Hancock manages the path a contract takes from draft to signature. Each approval and each signature is recorded along the way, so the finished agreement stands up to scrutiny long after it is signed.
Visit HancockAdvisory
Senior judgment for decisions that are expensive to get wrong.
Clients retain us when a decision about security, product direction or compliance will be hard to reverse, and they want people in the room who have made it before.
Discuss an engagement- Security architecture
- Trust boundaries, keys and failure modes decided deliberately and early.
- Product strategy
- What a product should become, who it is for, and what to leave out.
- Compliance and key management
- Meeting the requirements you are audited against, with keys handled in a way you can defend.
- Technical due diligence
- An independent read on a company's technology and security before you invest or acquire.
- Public key infrastructure
- Building, operating and repairing certificate authorities.
- Technical customer engagements
- Joining your customer conversations when the questions go deeper than sales can answer.
- Platforms and ecosystems
- The rules, incentives and governance that let many parties build on one platform and trust it.
- Healthy, capable teams
- Hiring, structure and engineering culture for teams that have to get hard things right.
Engineering
We build products for clients in the fields we know firsthand.
The engineers who build Goodkey, ForgeIQx, Martini Security and Fortify also work as a team for hire. This is the work clients have brought us.
Security and identity
Cryptography, certificates, passkeys and hardware keys, the same ground our own ventures cover.
Applied AI
Client products that put language models to work on documents, policy and evidence, with output a reviewer can check.
Computer vision
Reading identity documents, barcodes and images in the browser and on devices, built on our open source GammaCV library.
Finance and compliance
Client systems for lending, audit and regulatory work, where every result traces back to its source.
Product design
Interfaces designed by people who understand the system underneath, so the safe path is the obvious one.
In production
Over 900 million downloads of our open source packages every month.
Our libraries ship inside other companies' developer tools, products and cloud services, where most people never see our name.
How the industry uses our codeOur code runs inside software from
- Microsoft
- Cloudflare
- Meta
- Atlassian
- WordPress
- Electron
- Nx
npm downloads across all Peculiar Ventures packages for the 30 days ending September 16, 2026.
Company
A small senior team, close to the work.
Peculiar Ventures is a product, engineering and advisory firm led by Ryan Hurst. We work from Seattle and Poltava, and keep the people making technical decisions close to the code and the customer.
Building our own products keeps our advice grounded in what survives production, adoption and audit.
Where we work
Seattle, Washington ยท Poltava, Ukraine
Thinking
From Unmitigated Risk
AIThe Amnesia Cycle and Why AI Is Turning Developers Back Into TestersAI is shifting developers from producing code to judging generated output, reviving the testing skills and independent quality judgment the industry spent decades automating away.AIFrom Periodic Audit to Continuous AssurancePeriodic audits cannot keep pace with changing systems. Two companion essays examine why assurance evidence fails and how AI may finally make continuous reasoning practical.CertificatesFrom Chains to TreesThe WebPKI's cryptographic graph and governance hierarchy are different structures. Classical and post-quantum trust both depend on understanding the gap between them.
Tell us what you are trying to build or fix.
Your first call is with a senior engineer or advisor, and an hour is usually enough to know whether we are the right firm.