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Digital identity management solutions provider ForgeRock today announced that it raised $93.5 million in equity financing. CEO Fran Rosch says the fresh capital will enable the company to invest in R&D, cloud infrastructure, global sales, and promotion of its new and existing solutions, including AI tools.
ForgeRock’s product suite could be used — and is already being used by over 1,100 organizations including AutoZone, Philips, Geico, the BBC, BMW, Pearson, and Deloitte — to beat back the recent raft of identity compromise. According to private consultancy Javelin Strategy & Research, from 2016 to 2017, fraudulent takeovers of consumers’ accounts jumped 120%, and victims spent an average of $290 and 16 hours to fix those problems.
“This fundraising comes on the heels of a transformational year where ForgeRock … cemented [its] position as a leader in this fast-growing category. With enterprises moving off of legacy identity solutions for both workforce and consumer identity use cases, we knew we would need additional outside capital to maintain our strong momentum,” Rosch told VentureBeat via email. “This funding will turbo-charge our mission to fundamentally change the way companies connect with their employees and customers with the only AI-powered platform built for consumers, workforce, and things.”
ForgeRock is the brainchild of ex-Sun Microsystems employees, who cofounded the company after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in January 2010. They forked and built upon the code from Sun’s identity and access management software, which was scheduled to be phased out in favor of Oracle’s technology.
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ForgeRock’s premiere product — the Identity Platform — comprises identity management, access management, user-managed access, directory services, edge security, and identity gateway, along with autoscaling that allows developers to deploy up to billions of user identities. The identity relationships of entire workforces can be managed across channels (including on-premises, in the cloud, and on mobile) without requiring that people give up control of profiles, passwords, or privacy settings.
With ForgeRock, users can perform self-service tasks like changing their password and controlling what data is shared for privacy reasons, subject to company policies checked during workflow and password reset/change processes. Intelligent Authentication — a visual drag-and-drop tool that lets developers configure, measure, and adjust single sign-on login journeys — can take into account signals such as device, contextual, behavioral, user choice, analytics, and risk-based factors at login and optionally at authorization and resource access time.
Customers can use Identity Management to aggregate data from sources and create identity relationship models at a granular level (e.g., parents, children, and friends), which can be extended to devices users own or carry. These can define simple relationships such as a corporate laptop, personal phone, and leased car that can then be leveraged to make business orchestration and security decisions.
Regardless, Identity Management provides data visualization to identify the relationships for any user, device, or thing to detect anomalies in access or provisioning. It also delivers an auditing service that gives security teams the ability to trace the lifecycle of users and their activity, which can be stored in a database for reporting purposes or sent to standard security information and event management (SIEM) solutions for analysis.
ForgeRock also measures risk with respect to entitlements, at least to the extent that it identifies high-risk entitlements and tags them with real-time synchronization so that users can view all entitlements currently under management. This functionality complements ForgeRock’s Identity Governance product, which sends notifications to designated reviewers to verify user access and kicks off workflow or provisioning processes when the review is complete.
IT teams can protect against threats with the Identity Platform’s dynamic orchestration and intelligence engine, which captures rich context to make access decisions. Beyond that, ForgeRock offers directory services that enable companies to prep for growth with a database designed to handle large transaction volumes, as well as a gateway that ensures protocols are enforced consistently across apps, APIs, and microservices.
One of the newest additions to the ForgeRock family — Autonomous Identity — taps AI and machine learning to automate activities like approving access requests, performing certifications, and predicting what access should be provisioned to users. It joins Identity Cloud, a preconfigured and managed identity-as-a-service solution built atop the existing Identity Cloud suite.
Most of ForgeRock’s solutions can be consumed as services or deployed as software, and they support a range of environments including internet of things, cloud, mobile, and enterprise. Identity Platform customers gain access to the ForgeRock Trust Network, an ecosystem of more than 75 partners that provides access to capabilities using the Identity Platform as the foundation. Specialized authenticators, fraud and risk management, behavioral biometrics, and identity proofing integrations from those partners are included free of charge.
ForgeRock isn’t alone in a global identity and access market that’s anticipated to be worth $22.68 billion by 2025. New York-based Socure nabbed $30 million in February 2019 for its cloud-based identity verification and fraud prevention solution. Global identity verification provider Onfido raised $50 million early last year, and troubled identity management firm Jumio recently found more stable footing and launched a new authentication product. More recently, identity and credentials verification firm Auth0 and Evident raked in $103 million and $20 million, respectively.
But San Francisco-based ForgeRock claims that its customers see as much as a 25% savings on implementation costs and a 50% return on investment on average. Moreover, the company says that last year, revenue eclipsed $100 million, annual recurring revenue grew 75%, and year-over-year business hit 30%.
Riverwood Capital led ForgeRock’s latest round of funding (a series E), with participation from existing investors Accel, Meritech Capital, Foundation Capital, and KKR Growth. It brings the company’s total raised to $230 million following an $88 million series D in March 2017.
ForgeRock says it has more than 600 team members across its offices in Bristol and London, U.K.; Paris and Grenoble, France; Vancouver, Canada; Oslo, Norway; Munich, Germany; Sydney, Australia; and Singapore, up from 50 employees in 2010.
