Strata secures $26M series B financing

New round of funding to scale Maverics platform and accelerate go-to-market initiatives

I’m excited to announce an enormous milestone for Strata and the Identity Orchestration market. Today, we’re announcing our Series B financing of more than $26M to support Strata Identity’s rapid growth and to keep pace with the rapidly emerging next generation of identity for multi-cloud. Strata raised this new round of capital from new investors, Telstra Ventures, with support from existing investors Menlo Ventures and ForgePoint Capital.

World-class identity & cloud security investors

We chose to partner with Telstra Ventures because of their remarkable people, along with their expertise and success in identity and cloud security.

There are two important qualities we look for in investors: that they believe in our mission to secure apps and data anywhere and that they have the strategic patience to create a new category that is now quickly growing into a massive market — Identity Orchestration. 

We found both in Marcus Bartram and Saad Siddiqui and the whole Telstra Ventures team. I was impressed with the integrity, experience, and understanding we had with the Telstra Ventures team from the beginning. I can’t wait to work with them and our investor team to deliver on the promise and potential of Identity Orchestration.

Series B funding to meet the opportunity

The Identity Orchestration market has arrived. What we started in 2019 has steadily evolved over the past four years. It has quickly become one of the most important tools to accelerate modernization and manage the huge challenges caused by multiple cloud services and multi-vendor identity sprawl.

Identity Orchestration is a new segment of the IAM market, growing at 14% with an estimated value of $36B by 2030. 

To paraphrase Gartner, in the future, companies will either orchestrate or be orchestrated. We see this capability as a must-have enterprise identity technology, and Maverics is the most proven and intentionally designed Identity Orchestration solution in the world.

Company momentum of Strata Identity into 2023

Strata needed this capital to keep up with market demand and our rapid customer growth. We grew recurring revenue by more than 380% last year, working with Fortune 500 market leaders from agile digital-native startups across diverse industries, including financial services, retail, manufacturing, consulting, technology, and telecommunications, as well as state and local government.  

We’re humbled to have such delighted customers, which has led to a remarkable, industry-leading expansion profile; most of Strata’s customers double or quadruple their implementation within one year of initial purchase, and we’ve never lost a customer.

Strata’s team focus 

Our achievements are only possible because of the team at Strata. We’ve curated an extraordinary group of industry leaders across all business functions; Strata now has the most hands-on expertise with Identity Orchestration anywhere.

We assembled our team of Maverics with experts from the preeminent identity leaders in the industry, including Auth0, JumpCloud, Netegrity, Okta, OneLogin, Oracle, Ping, RSA, SailPoint, Salesforce, Securant, and Symplified. 

We brought together co-authors of SAML and co-created a new identity policy orchestration standard called IDQL (and the Hexa open source reference implementation) with our partners at S&P Global, Kroger, Cummins, Versa Networks, StrongDM, and the MEF standards group, among many others. 

In 2023, what is Identity Orchestration & what problems does it solve? 

In the large enterprise, there’s been a steady move to adopt multiple clouds. With these multiple clouds have come new silos of identity and security across old and new technology platforms.

The move to multiple clouds is driving the move to multiple identity systems. These enterprises now need a way to make these multiple identity systems coexist because consolidation often isn’t an option.

Compounding this complexity is the fact that these systems are widely distributed across the internet and use distributed architectures. These new distributed architectures require a rethinking of identity to work with the new paradigm.

Many organizations are in the midst of modernizing their apps and infrastructure. This means that apps need to upgrade the identity systems they use. Historically this has meant rewriting apps at a significant cost in both time and money, which has the effect of locking customers into legacy systems.

What is the Maverics Identity Orchestration platform? 

Strata’s Maverics Identity Orchestration software integrates all of an organization’s identity systems — both legacy on-premises and cloud infrastructure — into a common abstraction layer. We call this layer an identity fabric (similar to what Gartner refers to as a cybersecurity mesh or CSMA), enabling incompatible identity systems to work together seamlessly.

Maverics then manages the users’ runtime experience through user journeys, linking the user experience through sign-on and sign-up steps and through user and security flows that provide a secure and seamless user experience across apps.

Strata’s software breaks lock-in by decoupling apps from IDPs and enabling apps to switch to whatever IDP they need without rewriting any code.

Maverics is delivered from the cloud, runs on any cloud, and works for any app in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid – enabling customers to modernize apps, breaking identity lock-in, and improving security and resilience of digital operations.

Strata worked with industry partners to design an open policy language that normalizes identity and access policies across clouds and through the stack. This IDQL standard and its CNCF reference implementation Hexa are ushering in a new era of consistency that will solve the fragmentation problem in an open and free way.

What sets us apart from our competitors?

Strata solves a new problem that existing identity systems don’t, which is to integrate multiple identity and security solutions that an enterprise uses into an identity fabric.

Strata uniquely works with all the identity vendors and can run anywhere; other approaches are limited to a single cloud or limited to a single identity provider.

Strata makes an enterprise’s identity operations continuous and resilient, making it possible to failover from (for example) Okta to Microsoft in the event that Okta goes down without missing a beat. 

We can’t do it without your support

Astronauts don’t get to the moon without an incredible team of people supporting the mission. I want to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to all those that make our success possible — our customers, partners, investors, and most of all, our customers who enable Strata to define and create the future of identity — Identity Orchestration. Thank you!

With Aloha,

Eric Olden
CEO and Co-Founder, Strata Identity