Turning it Up to 11 - Investing in Our Future

It’s been a little over seven years since ForgeRock was founded in that small pub in London. Lasse, Steve, Jonathan, Victor, and Hermann shared a dream of building the best digital identity platform in the world. We’ve grown a lot from those early days and had some of our signature ForgeRock fun along the way (who else would host a summit at an iconic music venue like, ACL Live in Austin, instead of Vegas?). Through all the change that comes with a fast growing technology company, there’s been a constant: the support of our customers and our partners. To all of you who've believed in us since day one and to those of you who’ve joined the band through the years, I speak for everyone at ForgeRock when I say, thank you. It’s not always easy to believe in the vision of a company that’s out to shake up the traditional perception of identity, introducing new concepts like identity relationship management, customer identity, and the identity for the internet of things (IoT), but you did. You gave us your trust and we appreciate that every day. Today, as we announce $88M in Series D funding, led by Accel and KKR’s TMT Growth Fund, (with participation from our earlier investors, Foundation Capital and Meritech Capital Partners) to power our next stage of growth, I can say definitively, our mission is still the same as the day we were founded: to be the category leader in digital identity.

Raising a round of financing is a significant moment for any company. For ForgeRock, it emphasizes our utmost commitment to our customers. This is not only an investment in our company but an investment in you. It means significant product development to bring you the features that you’ve requested to power your digital transformation initiatives. It means continuing to provide you with world class support and service. And it means accelerating R&D to continue to stay ahead of the competition. Whether it’s using digital identity to build trusted customer relationships in customer identity and access management (CIAM) use cases, creating innovative new products and services with IoT, or complying with privacy regulations like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ForgeRock is for you.

The scale and flexibility of the ForgeRock Identity Platform has always been one of our strengths. Building on our standards-based architecture enables organizations to mold identity for their unique objectives and create new products and services. With this funding, we’ll be making a concerted effort to add industry specific improvements to the ForgeRock Identity Platform as well. For example, we’ll be introducing new product features to help our financial services customers meet requirements that come with Open Banking and PSD2. For our retail customers, we’ll be adding more marketing connectors and integrations to enable a true omnichannel experience. For any organization that processes customer data we’ll be introducing new privacy solutions to help maintain compliance with GDPR. And in the area of IoT, we’re hard at work refining our upcoming Edge Security product to secure connected devices at the edge. We continue to lead the way in the identity of things. These are just a few areas that we’re investing in and I encourage you to reach out to us to learn more about our roadmap.

We’re not only focused on the clear and present challenges. Our expert team of technologists at ForgeRock Labs is doing cutting edge work around artificial intelligence and machine learning that will be critical as security threats increase in volume and magnitude. Standard security practices won’t be enough to protect your digital ecosystem once millions of IoT devices get involved and networked through private and public clouds. The Labs team is looking at how digital identity can be supplemented with systems that adapt and learn to better identify users, devices, and things and manage the relationships between them.

All of this won’t be possible without some help. We’re looking for new band members to help us on this journey so if you’re interested in rocking with us, check out our careers page. For those who want to learn more about ForgeRock, our platform, and our people, I highly recommend attending one of our Identity Live summits. We’ve got a few stops left in Singapore, London, New York, Washington D.C. and Paris.

We’re more motivated than ever before to change the way the world sees digital identity and there are 88 million new reasons why identity is the center of everything. It’s been a year of tremendous momentum and growth. Now, let’s turn it up to 11!

Mike Ellis is Chairman and CEO at ForgeRock. You can find  him on Twitter @MikeEllis100