ForgeRock Raises $93.5 Million To Further Leverage Cloud, AI

The Series E funding will help ForgeRock implement a self-learning AI model that frees up customer personnel to scrutinize the highest-risk application access requests, CEO Fran Rosch tells CRN.

ForgeRock has raised $93.5 million to ensure that the identity security player is fully in the cloud by the time it pursues an initial public offering.

The San Francisco-based company said the Series E funding will help ForgeRock implement a self-learning artificial intelligence model that frees up customer personnel to scrutinize the highest-risk requests to access applications, according to CEO Fran Rosch. ForgeRock has raised more than $230 million since its founding a decade ago, and tapped Riverwood Capital to lead the latest round.

“This is a great market opportunity for partners to get involved in,” Rosch told CRN.

[Related: ForgeRock Lands $88M In Funding To Expand R&D, Sales Of Identity, IoT Security Solutions]

ForgeRock is focused on making it easier for customers migrate from homegrown or outdated identity systems to the company’s more modern identity platform, Rosch said. By mapping out the legacy systems itself as well as the external rules and policies the customer has in place, Rosch said ForgeRock can reduce the manual work customers from customers by 80 percent.

For instance, Rosch said many customers struggle under an onslaught of requests to provide new or transferred employees with access to certain applications and just end up rubber-stamping everything. But artificial intelligence can be used to look at a large volume of the requests and automate the approval of the 90 percent to 95 percent of the requests deemed to be low risk, according to Rosch.

As a result, Rosch said the remaining 5 percent to 10 percent of cases can now get more scrutiny, improving the security and risk profile of the enterprise.

From a cloud standpoint, Rosch said the company wants to provide customers with the option of running ForgeRock in a public cloud of their choice, in a private cloud, or leveraging their own identity Software as a Service while using the same code regardless. This provides large enterprises with flexibility and choice as they manage their own migration to the cloud, according to Rosch.

The ForgeRock architecture allows for data sovereignty and information to reside locally, which Rosch said is important given that half of the company’s business is outside the United States. The company plans to use the Series E funding to continue its move to cloud and SaaS platforms and simplify the integration process for customers and partners, according to Rosch.

From a go-to-market standpoint, Rosch said ForgeRock plans to hire more people dedicated to the channel as well as creating tools and content for partners. Specifically, Rosch said ForgeRock would like to make it easier for large enterprises to work with systems integrators like Accenture, Deloitte and PwC as well as more boutique consultancies to create a strategy around digital transformation and identity.

ForgeRock has a solution provider involved in all of its new opportunities, and the channel typically ends up sourcing half of the new business itself. The other half of business comes to ForgeRock directly, and the company gets a channel partner involved later in the process. Overall, ForgeRock has more than $100 million in annual sales and grew its recurring revenue by 75 percent over the past year.

Nulli Identity Management has been working with ForgeRock since its founding after realizing that other identity products tended to be bloated, overly cumbersome and lackadaisical about fixing problems in their software, according to CEO Derek Small. But the Calgary, Alberta-based solution provider found that ForgeRock has made it easy to apply patches and address issues across different code bases.

Small said he’d like to see ForgeRock continue to integrate the governance tools that the company has acquired, which he said should open doors that were closed in the past. In addition, investments around speed to deployment and eliminating the need for support for the company’s SaaS identity offering should help Nulli notch some big wins and address gaps in the requests the company has received.

“ForgeRock is kind of the Swiss Army knife of identity management at this point,” Small told CRN. “They solve really complex problems for clients.”