Symplified®, the Cloud Identity Company, today announced that it has raised $20M in a Series C round of venture capital financing led by Ignition Partners. The company, which tripled revenues and customer adoption last year, is the market share leader in the rapidly expanding cloud identity and access management (IAM) segment with more than 3 million licensed users of its cloud identity management platform. Symplified will use the funds to expand operations, service and support, research and development, and marketing resources to satisfy global demand for its cloud service which provides seamless IAM across SaaS, Web and mobile apps used by employees, customers and partners.
The company also announced that Cameron Myhrvold of Ignition Partners has joined its board of directors. Seattle-based Ignition is a leading investor in cloud infrastructure vendors including Cloudera, Heroku (now Salesforce.com), Zenprise, Xen (now Citrix) and others. Existing Symplified investors Allegis Capital, Granite Ventures, and Quest Software also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total funding to $38.8M.
“As enterprises seek to integrate management and control of access to cloud computing into their existing IT environments, they need the ability to transparently extend policies and controls that exist within the datacenter,” said Steve Coplan, senior analyst, enterprise security practice at 451 Research. “Symplified has built a platform for cloud identity and access management that uses a hybrid approach to bridge on-premises enterprise infrastructures with emerging cloud services. Symplified’s architecture allows organizations to deploy an ‘enterprise out’ approach that allows for access management logic to be securely extended, while still gaining the benefits of management functionality delivered as a service.”
With more than 3.8 million subscribers, Symplified is the world’s most proven cloud identity and access management service. It is used by both blue chip enterprises including HP, Blue Shield, ESPN, Forest Laboratories, Moody’s, Royal DSM and Zurich Insurance, as well as growing companies like Zynga, Netflix, American Hospital Association, Elan Pharma, Rambus and Dolby Laboratories. To meet new access control requirements created by the convergence of the cloud and mobile computing, Symplified recently introduced the first Cloud IAM solution for iPad, Kindle Fire, iPhone, and Android devices. Symplified provides seamless cloud identity management, access control, single sign-on, user management and auditing across any access device using a unique proxy gateway architecture deployed either in the cloud or on premises.
“Several years ago, Symplified recognized the security challenges and market opportunity that cloud computing would create,” said Cameron Myhrvold, partner at Ignition Partners. “Symplified pioneered the market for cloud identity and access management with a cloud delivered service that goes beyond single sign-on and is accessible to any sized organization. We were impressed by the company’s founders and their track record of innovation in the identity and access management space. First in Web access management, then in identity federation and now in cloud and mobile access management. Symplified is at the forefront of an enormous market opportunity to secure and manage the cloud.”
“We developed a purpose-built platform for converged identity management that makes cloud services as secure and manageable as if they were inside the firewall regardless of the location of users, apps, and devices. Unlike retrofitted federation software products being marketed as cloud solutions, Symplified is a pure-play cloud identity service,” said Eric Olden, CEO and Founder of Symplified. “We were looking for a partner who understands the enormously disruptive potential of the cloud for delivering infrastructure services like identity and access management. Ignition Partners is a perfect fit and the ideal partner to help Symplified scale up as the leader in cloud identity.”