Enabling businesses to secure their applications, data and infrastructure on a single platform, Saviynt demonstrates true investor enthusiasm for an identity management platform and was announced today by AB Private Credit Investors’ Tech Capital Solutions Group. announced that it had raised $50 million in debt.
Founder Sachin Nayyar, who returned to Saviynt as CEO this week with newly appointed president Paul Zolfagali, said the funding will go towards expanding Saviynt’s platform, acquiring customers and growing the company’s partner ecosystem. rice field. He said the investment will bring Saviynt’s total funding to date to his $270 million after raising his $130 million debt in 2021, and Saviynt will continue to grow in his identity management space. He said he became one of the more well-funded startups.
Asked why Saviynt chose debt over equity, Nayyar said it was “the best financing option for the company’s growth needs.” It probably reflects the harsh economic realities. According to Crunchbase data, global venture funding in 2022 is down 35% year-over-year from 2021, and investment in Q4 2022 was his lowest since Q1 2020. circles — expected to be big for startups in 2023.
“Despite the current funding environment, investment interest in high-growth identity companies like Saviynt has been particularly strong,” Nayyar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Identity management remains a priority spending area among large and medium-sized businesses, even during this volatile economic period, as identity becomes the new perimeter and is critical to cybersecurity.”
Given the lingering impact of the pandemic, the slowness of identity management will probably help. The shift to remote work has forced companies to reassess how they identify users and control access to assets on their networks. One pandemic-era survey found that 61% of businesses plan to increase their identity access management budget in 2021. Investors following this trend are investing more in identity management. Crunchbase reports that $3.2 billion of venture dollars will be poured into the identity management sector in 2021, a 2.5-fold increase from $1.3 billion last year.
Image credit: Sabint
Nayyar founded Saviynt in 2011 and remained there until 2018. Prior to starting the company, Nayyar was Chief Identity Strategist at Sun Microsystems and he was President of Brinqa, a cybersecurity risk management platform. After leaving Saviynt, Nayyar served as CEO of cybersecurity firm Securonix, where he led over $1 billion in growth investments from Vista Equity Partners last year.
According to Nayyar, Saviynt’s goal is what he sees as an agile, cloud-native, unified identity platform for employee, enterprise apps, privileged and third-party identities, a key need in the enterprise market. was to deal with. It’s a jargon. But basically, Nayyar wanted to reconcile multiple identity management tool licensing schemes and integrations to eliminate the need for federated identity products.
Saviynt lets you secure and control access to your assets, apps, and infrastructure across on-premises, hybrid, or multiple clouds. The platform provides workflows that simplify identity lifecycle management and dashboards designed to help prioritize remediation.
These are not groundbreaking features at all. Nayyar acknowledges that vendors such as SailPoint, CyberArk and Okta offer comparable technology and that they are not the only competitors. His ForgeRock, an identity management platform, raised his $275 million, and his IPO two years ago took him to a $2.8 billion valuation. Meanwhile, start-ups like ConductorOne, which brings automation to identity and access management, are closing in on incumbents.
But Nayyar argues that most of its competitors have simply stitched together various disparate technologies through acquisitions rather than building an integrated platform from scratch. Let’s take that in a nutshell — after all, Nayyar has a product to sell — but it’s true that Saviynt’s solution is pretty holistic.
Curiously, when asked about Saviynt’s customer base and revenue growth, Nayyar gave no figures, only saying revenue and customers have “more than doubled” since 2020. Within the next year. Whether there are plans to increase the number of employees.) That doesn’t instill a lot of trust in Saviynt’s orbit.Saviynt seems eager to share the numbers if the numbers are favorable. . But with Nayyar back at the helm and a huge new loan, Saviynt’s leadership is clearly keen to get the ship right.
Alex Barry, Head of Origination at AB Tech Capital Solutions, said: The company’s strong financial performance and market opportunities support our expectations for a long-term and successful relationship. ”
