Keyfactor raises $77 million

Thanks to VentureBeat — Keyfactor, formerly Certified Security Solutions, was founded in 2001 with the mission of automating digital security management across automotive, financial, health care, and retail verticals. In the nearly 20 years since its incorporation, it has carved out a sizeable slice of the $22.68 billion global identity and access management market. The company says it has managed to double revenue year over year, with clients in the Global 2000, like Lightspeed Systems. Moreover, it now secures more than 500 million digital certificates — i.e., electronic documents used to verify the identify of an individual or company, and to associate that identity with a public key — and is poised to expand its reach significantly in the year ahead.

Keyfactor today announced that it has secured $77 million in a growth funding round led by Insight Venture Partners, which it will use to “accelerate” its market expansion and meet growing demand for its solutions. The fundraising, which comes after a $5.5 million Series B and a $3.5 million Series A in March 2014, brings the firm’s capital raised to $86.9 million — nearly tenfold the previous total.

“Infosec professionals are challenged to fully anticipate and understand their cyber risk to continuously improve and scale their cyber defenses — and Keyfactor is committed to giving our customers the freedom to fully protect the next generation of applications and devices,” said Kevin von Keyserling, CEO and cofounder of Keyfactor. “This investment enables us to strengthen our leadership position as innovation partner to InfoSec professionals.”

Keyfactor’s services suite, which includes certificate management tool Keyfactor Command and end-to-end identity platform Keyfactor Control, aims to simplify tasks like real-time discovery, monitoring, and the issuing and replacement of digital certificates and keys. Its AnyAgent feature extends certificate orchestration capabilities to systems like IIS, Apache, F5, Docker, Java Keystores, AWS Certificate Manager, and others and can optionally code-sign software patches to stop malicious update packages in their tracks.

It’s a lucrative gig, to be sure, with cybersecurity spend growing an average 33 percent per year. And it’s not a particularly hard sell: Over the next five years, it’s anticipated that over 146 billion records will be breached and that ransomware damage will rise to $11.5 billion in 2019, with an attack occurring every 14 seconds.

“We serve the industries where trust and reputation matter most — including health care and financial services — and where innovative solutions provide a competitive advantage,” explained John Harris, chief revenue officer at Keyfactor. “[H]aving the backing of a pre-eminent investor like Insight Venture Partners gives Keyfactor additional muscle to continue our sector-leading innovation to the full benefit of our customers.”

Of course, Keyfactor competes with behemoths in the field, like Symantec’s Verisign, DigiCert, Comodo Group, and GeoTrust. In 2017 alone, Verisign’s revenue hit $1.17 billion.

But Michael Triplett, managing director at Insight Venture Partners, believes there’s more than enough room for boutique competition.

“Keyfactor is a best-in-class technology solving a mission-critical problem for enterprise security, and the company’s commitment to customers is unparalleled,” he said. “Keyfactor’s suite of solutions enables businesses to get ahead of today’s threats while giving them the ability to scale and innovate for the future. We evaluated this segment thoroughly and chose to invest in the company that possessed clear technological leadership and is driving the greatest customer success.”