Okta Cloud ID Management Firm Joins Unicorn Club

A cloud identity management company has a new identity of its own: that of a unicorn.

With $75 million in funding announced yesterday (Sept. 8), tech startup Okta is valued at close to $1.2 billion (as first reported by The Wall Street Journal), making it an official member of the Unicorn Club. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital led the round, which was also joined by Khosla Ventures, Altimeter and Glynn Capital, among others.

Funded in 2009 by two officials at Salesforce, Okta software unites in the cloud the various software applications used by a company, giving its workers (both full-time and contracted), partners and customers a single login for Web services. A major selling point for Okta, according to WSJ, is the security it offers.

“We’re at an important inflection point where IT leaders, product developers, industry analysts and the biggest technology companies in the world are acknowledging the critical role identity plays in connecting people, apps, devices and organizations,” Todd McKinnon, Okta CEO, stated in a press release. “Okta pioneered cloud-based identity management, which set us up to become the foundation for secure connections between people and technology. We’ll leverage our new capital to build on that foundation, accelerating our leadership position, driving deeper innovation across all our product lines and continuing our growth and expansion into new regions.”

“Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest had a vision for the future of cloud computing that has propelled Okta to become the runaway market leader in identity management,” said Ben Horowitz, cofounder and partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in the release. “This new round of funding will enable them to expand their scope to secure everything that people interact with and bring that solution to the world.”

Including the latest round of funding that has put it in the Unicorn Club, Okta has raised $230 million to date.

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