Strata, the distributed multi-cloud identity orchestration company, today
announced it has closed an $11M Series A round of financing led by Menlo
Ventures and supported by ForgePoint Capital. The company's founders
co-authored the SAML standard used today to transparently provide cross-cloud
identity and single sign-on (SSO) between web sites. Strata has built the first
distributed identity orchestration platform, called Maverics, to revolutionize
the fast-growing $12B identity and access management (IAM) market.
Strata will use the funds to scale research & development, go-to-market,
sales, marketing, and customer success for its Maverics platform. Strata also
announced that Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures, has joined the
company's board of directors.
Businesses are increasingly using multiple cloud services. In these
distributed environments there is no way to centrally manage identity and
security policies across each cloud platform which all use unique identity
systems. Strata has cracked the code by building a distributed Identity Fabric
that bridges and unifies multiple cloud identity systems, as well as older data
center systems, so they can be managed as one. This technology addresses both
the $12B IAM market as well as the $142B cloud adoption and migration market.
In October, research and advisory firm Gartner named Strata a Cool Vendor in
Identity Access Management and Fraud Detection, stating: "Although many
applications are now cloud-native, moving legacy to the cloud can present
challenges. The identity models expected by legacy are not necessarily those
that are native to the cloud. Therefore, providing an identity orchestration
architecture that enables lift-and-shift, with no rewrites or application
reengineering, will enable rapid cloud adoption."
"The cloud has created an identity management crisis, with companies being
forced to simultaneously manage on-premises and several different cloud
provider systems to enforce security policies," said Eric Olden, CEO of Strata.
"We eliminate this problem with an identity fabric that unifies the management
of hybrid cloud environments through identity orchestration. Rather than rip
and replace different identity systems, identity orchestration creates an
abstraction layer that enables customers to mix and match identity technologies
on different clouds easily, without rewriting apps, compromising security or
user experience. This challenge has created a massive market opportunity. This
funding will help us scale up."
"Strata is addressing a massive pain point for enterprises, which only gets
worse as they migrate more applications to the cloud," said Venky Ganesan,
Partner at Menlo Ventures. "The last time I got this excited about a security
company was when I met the founders of Palo Alto Networks. Strata is
going to transform the identity space."