Strata Identity secures $11M in Series A funding to revolutionize the $12B identity and access management (IAM) market

Businesses are increasingly using multiple cloud services. In these distributed environments there is no way to centrally manage identity and security policies across each cloud platform which all use unique identity systems. Enter Strata, a Boulder, Colorado-based tech startup founded by the team behind SAML Web Standard. Strata has figured out how to unify data center and cloud identity management systems as one and remove obstacles to multi-cloud adoption.

The startup has built a distributed Identity Fabric that bridges and unifies multiple cloud identity systems, as well as older data center systems, so they can be managed as one. This technology addresses both the $12B IAM market as well as the $142B cloud adoption and migration market.

Today, Strata announced today it has closed $11 million in Series A funding to scale research & development, go-to-market, sales, marketing, and customer success for its Maverics platform. The round was led by Menlo Ventures and supported by ForgePoint Capital. Alongside the funding, Strata also announced that Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures, has joined the company’s board of directors.

Founded in 2019 by Eric Leach, Eric Olden, and Topher Marie, Strata’s team co-authored the SAML standard used today to transparently provide cross-cloud identity and single sign-on (SSO) between websites. Strata has built the first distributed identity orchestration platform, called Maverics. Strata Identity provides distributed multi-cloud identity solutions to enterprises. Its identity orchestration platform is designed specifically for hybrid and multi-cloud environments that enable users to easily manage distributed identity systems.

In October, research and advisory firm Gartner named Strata a Cool Vendor in Identity Access Management and Fraud Detection, stating: “Although many applications are now cloud-native, moving legacy to the cloud can present challenges. The identity models expected by legacy are not necessarily those that are native to the cloud. Therefore, providing an identity orchestration architecture that enables lift-and-shift, with no rewrites or application reengineering, will enable rapid cloud adoption.1”

“The cloud has created an identity management crisis, with companies being forced to simultaneously manage on-premises and several different cloud provider systems to enforce security policies,” said Eric Olden, CEO of Strata. “We eliminate this problem with an identity fabric that unifies the management of hybrid cloud environments through identity orchestration. Rather than rip and replace different identity systems, identity orchestration creates an abstraction layer that enables customers to mix and match identity technologies on different clouds easily, without rewriting apps, compromising security or user experience. This challenge has created a massive market opportunity. This funding will help us scale up.”

“Strata is addressing a massive pain point for enterprises, which only gets worse as they migrate more applications to the cloud,” said Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “The last time I got this excited about a security company was when I met the founders of Palo Alto Networks. Strata is going to transform the identity space.”