ForgeRock has filed Form S-1 with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), this morning, as the identity management provider moves on to its IPO.
Initial pricing was not provided by the company for its shares. They will trade on New York Stock Exchange under symbol FORG. Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. are leading the IPO. The company is valued at $4 billion according to Bloomberg. This is a substantial increase over the $730m post-money value PitchBook had for it after its last round in 2020.
The need to protect and manage user identities is becoming more important due to the increasing number of cyberattacks on organizations of all sizes. ForgeRock, a San Francisco-based company, has raised $233,000,000 in funding in multiple rounds. Riverwood Capital and Accenture Ventures led the company's last round, a $93.5million Series E in April 2020. TechCrunch was told by Fran Rosch, CEO, that this round would be the final before an IPO. This is also what Mike Ellis, former CEO, said to us following the $88 million Series D of September 2017.
Although the timing of the company's IPO was not clear over the past few years, it has continued to grow. ForgeRock's S-1 reported that its annual recurring revenues (ARR) were $155 million as of June 30, which represents a 30% increase year-over-year.
The company reported a $20m net loss, down from $36M a year earlier. The company estimates that there is $71 billion in global identity services market.
Okta is one of the many competitors To ForgeRock. Okta went public in 2017, and has grown steadily over the years. Okta bought cloud identity startup Auth0, worth $6.5 billion, in a deal that raised eyebrows. Ping Identity is another competitor. It went public in 2019, and is growing fast. On August 4, Ping Identity reported that its ARR reached $279.6 millions in its quarter ended June 30. This is a 19% increase year-over-year. Over the years there have been several big exits from the space, such as Duo Security being acquired by Cisco in 2018 for $2.35billion.
ForgeRock is a great access management tool, and they are still a strong player for customer identity and management (CIAM), said Michael Kelley from Gartner's senior research director.
Kelley pointed out that ForgeRock has converted its core access management services to a SaaS delivery method in 2020. This helped the company catch up to the rest of the market, which already offers access management as SaaS. The company also introduced a new product, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), last year.
Kelly said that ForgeRock Trees is one of the most interesting products they offer. It is a no code/low-code orchestration tool to build complex authorization and authentication journeys for customers. This is especially useful in the CIAM market.
ForgeRock was established in 2010. However, its roots can be traced back to OpenSSO (an open-source single-sign-on project) that was started by Sun Microsystems in 2005. A number of Sun Microsystems' open-source projects were left unfinished after Oracle bought them in 2010. This led to a few former Sun employees starting ForgeRock.
ForgeRock has grown significantly over the past decade beyond providing single sign-on. It now offers an identity platform that can handle enterprise, consumer and IoT use cases. Today, the company's platform handles identity and access management, as well as identity governance.
ForgeRock's S-1 is all about scaling. It notes that the platform can process over 60,000 user-based transactions per second per customer.
According to the S-1, four of our customers had 100 million or more license identities as of June 30, 2021. We are able to meet mission-critical requirements in complex environments for large customers, which allows us to expand our customer base and grow within each one. We are able to serve mission-critical needs in complex environments for large customers, which allows us to grow our base of large customers and expand within each one.
