A Boulder-based startup that promises to unify businesses' identity management systems into a single platform raised $26 million in Series B financing to boost its sales and marketing.
The founders of Strata Identity believe the raise can help propel the startup to become a leader in the identity and access management market. The round was led by Telstra Ventures, a San Francisco-based firm that focuses on startups preparing to scale. Also participating were a few of Strata's existing investors, Menlo Ventures, Forgepoint Capital and Innovating Capital.
With the raise, Marcus Bartram, a general partner at Telstra Ventures, will join the company's board of directors, Strata announced.
“Strata is disrupting the traditional proprietary identity management model by making it possible for legacy and cloud identity systems to interoperate, all without the need to modify applications,” Bartram said in a statement. “We believe the company’s first-of-its-kind identity orchestration platform has the potential to eliminate decades of vendor lock-in for customers and slingshot Strata to the top of the identity market leader board.”
Strata developed Maverics, a platform that allows organizations to adopt modern cloud identity systems while still using its legacy applications, without the need to rewrite any code. The startup claims the platform saves its customers millions of dollars and years' worth of time spent manually writing code.
Strata's platform is used by financial services institutions, retailers, governments, telecommunications companies and insurance agencies, the startup said. CEO and co-founder Eric Olden said Strata's recurring revenue grew by 380% in 2022.
“This new round of funding gives us the resources to scale up and meet colossal market demand for the Maverics platform," Olden said in a statement. "We selected Telstra because of their experience and track record in identity with Auth0, Crowdstrike, Cloud Knox and others, and are excited to welcome Marcus Bartram to our board.”
Strata plans to use the funding to grow its sales and marketing efforts, as well as its go-to-market and customer success initiatives.
A rise in cybersecurity threats around the world has ramped up demand for secure access to business functions and driven the growth of the identity and access management market, according to a November study from United Kingdom-based Fairfield Market Research. The increasing prevalence of remote and hybrid work models has also increased the market's expansion. Fairfield projected the market would grow to nearly $25 billion by 2026, up from about $10 billion in 2019.
Other companies in the market include Denver-based Ping Identity, as well as San Francisco-based Forge Rock and Entrust Corporation in Minneapolis.
Olden told TechCrunch that Strata is unique because its Maverics platform allows customers to run new and old identity management applications alongside each other without writing code, which is the "biggest roadblock to cloud migration and app modernization," he said.
Strata was founded in 2019 and has brought together a "dream team" of pioneers in the identity management industry, a news release said. Its employees came from Autho0, RSA, Sailpoint and Boulder-based JumpCloud. Olden previously worked in cloud security and identity management for Oracle.
The Series B financing brings Strata to $42 million in venture capital. The startup raised $11 million in a Series A round last year.
