Venafi
announced that the company has surpassed $100 million in annual
recurring revenue (ARR), cementing its leadership as category creator.
This news comes on the heels of Thoma Bravo's strategic growth investment in Venafi,
valuing the company at $1.15 billion in December 2020. Venafi is
uniquely positioned to capitalize on the rapid growth of machine
identity management within security markets, and to that end, the
company has appointed Sandeep Singh Kohli as chief marketing officer.
"We
invented machine identity management, and the market is growing
incredibly fast," said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi. "Machines use
identities to gain access just like humans use identities. Digital
transformation is driving an explosion in the number of machines, and we
solve the problems that this explosion is creating. If these problems
aren't solved, systems fail and vulnerabilities multiply. It is getting
worse because the perimeter has evaporated, and security now is
fundamentally based on identity. Additionally, the speed of business is
so fast that security has to be built in at the time of development.
Everything is moving to the cloud and microservices architectures. As
the innovators and inventors, we are leading the charge to reshape
security to be led by developers."
Hudson
continued: "To help us drive this industry transformation, I am excited
to announce that Sandeep Singh Kohli has joined our organization as
CMO. He is a transformative leader with deep experience bringing
solutions to development teams. In addition, Sandeep has an excellent
track record building high-performance teams and scaling world-class
companies. His experience and skillset are a perfect fit for Venafi as
we expand the market and continue to accelerate our growth."
Before
joining Venafi, Kohli led global marketing at Kong, where he built a
high performing go-to-market team and scaled the company from early
stage to unicorn - 1,908 percent revenue growth in three years. Before
joining Kong, he led global platform marketing at MuleSoft, establishing
it as a category leader, and helped scale the business from pre-IPO
into one of the fastest-growing public enterprise software companies. At
Venafi, Kohli will lead all global marketing initiatives, with a
special focus appealing to the growing demand for automated machine
identity management solutions that increase collaboration between
developers and InfoSec teams.
A
majority of Venafi's rapid growth in 2020 was driven by delivering
solutions that offer frictionless machine identity management for
developers. This solution capitalizes on the rapid shift to microservice
architectures, which address key concerns for application developers
such as speed, agility and modernization. According to Gartner, Inc., by
2022 more than 75% of global organizations will be running
containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.
In addition, the company acquired Jetstack,
the global leader in open source machine identity management software
for Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems, in May 2020. Cert-manager,
Jetstack's open source solution for certificate management, now receives
over two million downloads per day. Venafi also doubled the number of
projects participating in the Machine Identity Management Development Fund and launched the Indie Developers Program to expand the pace of machine identity management innovation.
Expanding
into this new market was accomplished while the firm continued to
expand on the organization's market-leading enterprise-grade machine
identity management solutions that solve network security and
reliability goals. The urgent need for automated, scalable machine
identity management solutions is starkly illustrated by the nation-state
attack on SolarWinds that ultimately impacted the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the U.S. Department of
Defense, the U.S. State Department, NASA, Microsoft, Credit Suisse,
Ford, Visa, MasterCard, Hertz and Cisco, as well as many other
organizations.
"Security
is shifting into the software development environment and creating a
whole new set of market opportunities," said Sandeep Singh Kohli, CMO at
Venafi. "Venafi created the machine identity management category, and
we're building momentum in Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems. As a
marketer, these kinds of inflection points are really exciting. The
combination of this unique market opportunity and Venafi's laser focus
on growth, innovation and dedication to customer success means the
opportunities ahead of us are really unlimited. I'm honored to be a part
of this team as we embark on the next chapter."
Digital
transformation is driving a dramatic increase in machine-to-machine
communication, which can only be secured using machine identities to
authorize secure communications. Forrester estimates that
machine identities are growing twice as fast as human identities across
most organizations. This massive proliferation in the number and types
of machine identities and the minimal security controls that typically
surround them have triggered a corresponding 400% increase in the frequency of attacks targeting them. Unmanaged and poorly protected machine identities already cause $15 billion to $21 billion in economic losses in the United States.