Strata Identity Raises $11M Series A For Multicloud Identity Management

Multicloud identity management platform Strata Identity has raised $11 million in a Series A round, the company said Tuesday.

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Strata helps companies using multiple clouds manage identity and security policies across the different cloud services. There’s no question that companies are moving to the cloud, CEO Eric Olden said, but the challenge with multiple clouds is managing who has access to what.

“Now, it’s hard to find an enterprise that isn’t on the cloud and isn’t doing this across multiple cloud platforms,” Olden said in an interview with Crunchbase News. “So I think it’s really been a problem in the past three years where it’s become mandatory to figure out a multicloud (system).”

Menlo Ventures led the round, with participation from ForgePoint Capital. Menlo Ventures Partner Venky Ganesan will also join Strata’s board of directors.

Olden, a former senior vice president and general manager of cloud security and identity management at Oracle, is the “Tom Brady of identity,” Ganesan said, which is part of the reason the firm wanted to invest.

“I was like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers,” Ganesan said. “When the GOAT is on the market, you’ve got to get in.” 

The most exciting area of cybersecurity is identity, Ganesan said, because it’s the “linchpin of everything you do.”

“If your identity got compromised, that’s an issue. Who you are, what you’ve done, what you have access to is central to cybersecurity,” he added.

Strata, Ganesan said, is building a core infrastructure for enterprises’ future. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the push to digital and the cloud with so many companies having distributed teams.

“I think we saw that with 2020…when we were in our seed stage just getting things going, the expectation was that the market will understand what we’re doing in maybe two years, but we’ve got to start now,” Olden said. “But instead of this being in two or three years, it happened in two or three months.”

The company, which is technically based in Boulder, Colorado and was founded in 2019, has 26 employees and plans to double by the end of the year, focusing on product and research and development.

“The financing is coming at a great inflection point for the company,” Olden said. “We were not looking for capital last year, and we were raising capital from customers. That’s always a great way to start, but now we need to scale. And we need to add more in the engineering side of things, and that’s really the focus this year, getting the initial customers really happy, thrilled and successful using the software, and then we’re going to scale the team.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias