Vancouver, Canada-based customer identity and access management (cIAM) firm LoginRadius has raised $17 million Series A funding led by ForgePoint Capital and Microsoft’s venture fund, M12.
Founded in 2012 by Rakesh Soni (CEO) and Deepak Gupta (CTO), LoginRadius has concentrated on cIAM — initially as a social login provider, but now the provider of a multi-faceted, cloud-based, full-function cIAM platform. In its six years it has grown largely without external capital funding (previously raising a total of $2.3 million in initial and seed funding); and it has achieved triple digit growth in its last two years.
With the demand for customer (as opposed to enterprise) identity and access management growing rapidly, the new funding is designed to ensure that the firm can expand to meet potential requirements. Driving this growth is the ongoing digital transformation of business. Commercial enterprises are no longer satisfied with identity alone, but seek complete identity profiles of their customers in order to provide a more personalized service.
This makes cIAM a very different requirement to enterprise IAM. While enterprise IAM is concerned with validating the identity of a relatively small and finite number of known company employees, cIAM needs to handle the identity and profile of an infinite number of potentially worldwide internet customers.
“In customer identity you do not control the identity,” Soni told SecurityWeek: “you just define it. Control remains with the customers who decide whether they want to keep the identity, destroy the identity, whether they want to access 20 of your brands or just one. And because the system faces outwards rather than inwards, the compliance requirements that are absent in employee identity becomes extremely critical — especially, for example, with GDPR and the other privacy regulations popping up throughout the world.”
The scale is very different. “While most companies have a maximum of a few hundred thousand employees,” he continued, “one of our biggest clients has 50 million identities. Those people can access the client from anywhere on the planet, and they need the system to be up and running 24/7. For employee IAM, if the system is down for ten or 15 minutes (especially out of business hours) the impact is minimal. But in the case of cIAM even small downtimes can damage revenue and impact brand satisfaction.”
These requirements, he suggests, demand a cloud-based solution. “With increasing customer experience expectations and growing cybersecurity threats, enterprises need a modern cloud-based identity platform that can be the foundation for digital transformation and provide peace of mind when it comes to security. This funding is a testament to LoginRadius’ ability to deliver on this promise to our customers and sets the foundation for our future growth.”
The firm already has offices in London, San Francisco, Sydney, and Jaipur; and plans to double its workforce over the next 12 months.
“Customer identity is at the intersection of security, digital business and compliance. This requires significant expertise to build and maintain in-house, resulting in extended go-to market time,” said Deepak Gupta. “LoginRadius provides the answer to this critical challenge with its out-of-the-box solution.”
The LoginRadius cloud platform is built with RESTful APIs and open sourced SDK libraries to allow developers to implement authentication, login interfaces and web SSO without worrying about back-end capabilities such as data management, disaster recovery, performance, system availability and scalability. It already serves more than 700 million identities, and handles 7.5 billion API calls per month.
“Forward-thinking companies are looking for secure, cloud-based identity solutions that can serve a global customer base and handle complex scenarios,” commented Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president at Microsoft and global head of M12. LoginRadius is “delivering on their promise to simplify customer identity management, which allows enterprise companies to more easily achieve their digital transformation ambitions.”
Related: The Great Analyst Debate Over Consumer IAM
Related: California, Home of Silicon Valley, Ramps Up Online Privacy Law
Related: GDPR – Not Just a European Concern
