Identity Firm JumpCloud Raises $75M To Boost Ties With MSPs

JumpCloud CEO Rajat Bhargava says the Series E funding round will help increase the share of business flowing through the channel from 33 percent today to 50 percent in the next couple of years.

JumpCloud has closed a Series E funding round to scale its global presence, strengthen its footprint in the channel and innovate on its identity platform.

JumpCloud CEO Rajat Bhargava said the $75 million in funding will fuel awareness and relationship-building efforts in the channel to help the Denver-based company increase the share of business flowing through partners from 33 percent today to 50 percent in the next couple of years. JumpCloud also plans to dramatically increase its head count from about 200 workers today to 700 in a few years.

“We decided this was the right time for us to go bigger,” Bhargava told CRN. “We want to be out there building an amazing product for people.”

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Bhargava said MSPs can use JumpCloud’s Cloud Directory to help customers safely and efficiently connect to the resources they need such as systems, servers, file applications, networks, VPN and Wi-Fi. Unlike competitors that focus primarily on single sign-on, Bhargava said JumpCloud goes beyond web applications to help users with securely connecting to all of their IT resources.

JumpCloud primarily services customers with between 50 and 5,000 seats, and Bhargava said companies around the world of this size often have their IT infrastructure managed by MSPs. Businesses without in-house technology resources or expertise typically rely on an MSP to fulfill their IT needs, Bhargava said, while organizations that do have their own IT person were traditionally serviced by JumpCloud directly.

The company would like to expand its channel footprint from 1,000 partners today to between 2,000 and 3,000 partners a year from now by boosting solution provider coverage in emerging markets like the Middle East and South America, Bhargava said. JumpCloud plans to do more digital advertising and partner advertising in the Middle East and South America to boost awareness, he said.

Roughly half of JumpCloud’s sales today come from outside the U.S., and while the company is looking to slightly boost its share of international business, Bhargava said no massive change is desired. And from a personnel standpoint, Bhargava said JumpCloud is looking to add 250 new engineers as well as 250 employees supporting its sales, marketing and customer success organizations.

As far as technology goes, JumpCloud is doubling down on user experience and engineering capabilities to ensure customers can authenticate user identity, secure data, control targeted IT resources and ensure the network is safe to traverse, he said. JumpCloud traditionally focused on core directory services and has more recently expanded its zero-trust philosophy to components, Bhargava said.

Meanwhile, Bhargava said investments in JumpCloud’s multitenant portal will make it easier for MSPs to manage multiple customers from a single console. Going forward, Bhargava said JumpCloud plans to track revenue, net dollar retention, and sales and marketing investment to ensure that the company’s platform is solving major customer problems and that JumpCloud is growing in a sustainable manner.

JumpCloud’s push to disrupt the identity and Active Directory markets piqued the interest of Altitude Integrations, and the Niwot, Colo.-based MSP first partnered with the vendor three and a half years ago, according to co-CEO Brett Ramberg. Altitude Integrations has been pleased with JumpCloud’s simple on-boarding process and robust capabilities around managing the customer environment, he said.

“If someone can access and control your identity, they have control of your organization,” Ramberg said. “When it comes to security, you don’t want to guess.”

Ramberg said he’d like to see JumpCloud use the proceeds from its Series E funding round to create deeper integrations with Kaseya and ConnectWise so that user information and license counts can automatically be pulled into the platform. More automation around IT service management tools would boost efficiency from the start of the customer on-boarding process to the invoicing for services, he said.

“As long as we keep going down this road, we’ll see better and better things from JumpCloud,” Ramberg said.