JumpCloud Raises $159M To Aid User And Device Management

‘There’s such a big opportunity for our channel partners to reorient from a device-centric model to a user-centric model,’ says CEO Rajat Bhargava as the directory platform vendor notches a $2.56 billion valuation.

JumpCloud has closed its Series F round and notched a $2.56 billion valuation to add additional capabilities to its directory platform and drive channel sales.

The Louisville, Colorado-based company plans to use the money to expand its cloud directory platform beyond core identity features such as single sign-on, device management, multi-factor authentication, identity governance and administration, and privileged access management, according to CEO Rajat Bhargava. JumpCloud also wants to leverage its base of more than 1,200 MSP partners to reach more SMB clients.

“There’s such a big opportunity for our channel partners to reorient from a device-centric model to a user-centric model,” Bhargava told CRN. JumpCloud’s $159 million funding round was led by venture capital firm Sapphire Ventures and comes just eight months after the company completed a $100 million Series E funding round led by BlackRock Innovation Capital.

[Related: Identity Firm JumpCloud Raises $75M To Boost Ties With MSPs]

JumpCloud today has between 15 percent and 20 percent of its sales going through the channel, and Bhargava said he’d like to see roughly half of the company’s business going through solution providers in the long-term. The company primarily sells to customers with between 50 and 5,000 seats, and those without an internal IT function almost always prefer to procure their products through an MSP, he said.

The company has invested in features like a multi-tenant portal that make it easier for MSPs to manage their JumpCloud customers, Bhargava said. JumpCloud plans to use the Series F funding to invest in more technical and sales personnel for solution providers as well as marketing resources around content and partner enablement, Bhargava said. The company has clients in more than 100 countries, he said.

“For us to be successful in that market, we basically have to be very close with MSPs,” Bhargava said.

From a technology standpoint, Bhargava said JumpCloud is looking to invest in capabilities that make it easy for people to securely and frictionlessly access the IT resources they need both on-premises and in the cloud. Although JumpCloud hasn’t made any acquisition since its founding nine years ago, Bhargava anticipates that M&A will be part of the company’s feature expansion strategy moving forward.

“The cloud directory platform that we‘re building will subsume all these ancillary categories that existed as point solutions that organizations had to go purchase on top of [Microsoft] Active Directory,” Bhargava said. “We’re trying to [consolidate] that stack of solutions into one platform.”

One of JumpCloud’s main advantages over its directory services competitors is that it can support Windows, Mac and Linux-based deployments both in the cloud or on-premises as well as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Amazon Web Services collaboration tools. JumpCloud also secures connections to devices and servers rather than just focusing on web application connections, he said.

From a metrics standpoint, Bhargava said JumpCloud is focused primarily on annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth as well as net revenue retention (NRR). NRR indicates if customers like JumpCloud’s product and see the company as a long-term partner by tracking their growth with the company, according to Bhargava.

“We’ve been incredibly fortunate over the years to build a great company and we want to continue to do that,” Bhargava said. “Being able to come out with that kind of information hopefully send the message that we‘re here for the long term.”

Macktez started using JumpCloud five years ago to do RADIUS authentication against Google Apps, and has been impressed by the company’s ability to work with multiple operating systems and in remote-centric environments, said CTO Reilly Schull. JumpCloud has everything from local device authentication and mobile device management to encryption key management and password synchronization, he said.

As a result of its integrations, Schull said Macktez customers see the exact same JumpCloud splash page regardless of if they’re signing into Microsoft, Google, or Apple.

“It’s an extremely unified experience with an extremely useful feature set,” Schull said.

Going forward, Schull said he’d like to see JumpCloud increase its lead in mobile device management and build out increased integrations with Microsoft to get group management to the same level it is for Google and Amazon. As JumpCloud pushed upmarket, Schull said it’ll encounter more customers using Microsoft services, making increased collaboration with Microsoft critical in the long-term.

“If people aren’t familiar with JumpCloud, they should really give it a try,” Schull said. “It’s a super great product.”