Identity management company Okta has officially filed for an initial public offering, seeking to raise $100 million.
The tech IPO scene has been rather sluggish in the past several years, but things are expected to pick up in 2017 and the recent Snap IPO breathed some much-needed new life into the space.
Many believe that the Snap IPO opened the door to more tech IPOs and they might just be right. The tech IPO scene is indeed picking up and the latest to file an IPO is Okta, marking the third IPO in less than two months following Snap and Yext.
Neither Yext nor Okta are as well-known as Snapchat's parent company, Snap, but they nonetheless aim to bank on the cloud computing market that's growing at a tremendous pace.
Okta IPO
Just like Yext, Okta is seeking to raise up to $100 million through its IPO, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Okta says it has nearly 3,000 business customers, including big-brand names such as LinkedIn, Adobe, 20th Century Fox, Experian and Mass Mutual. It's also worth pointing out that Okta's services for identity and access management or IAM are compatible with a slew of third-party apps from various vendors including Microsoft, Google, NetSuite, Workday and more.
The company describes itself as the "foundation for secure connections between people and technology" and it believes that identity is the key.
"Okta is the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise. Okta pioneered identity in the cloud. The Okta Identity Cloud is our category defining platform that enables our customers to securely connect people to technology, anywhere, anytime and from any device," says the company.
"Identity has always been the key to establishing trust between users and technologies. We founded Okta in 2009 to reinvent identity for the cloud era, where identity is the critical foundation in an increasingly dynamic world of devices and applications."
Through the Okta Identity Cloud, companies can take advantage of the cloud and the various mobile technologies to attract more users and keep them engaged with their preferred applications.
Okta Background
Okta started out back in 2009, co-founded by Salesforce's former chief of engineering, Todd McKinnon. The identity management firm has been operating in the cloud from the very beginning, running on Amazon Web Services from day one. The recent AWS cloud glitch that broke part of the internet should not affect Okta's IPO performance despite its reliance on AWS, as many software companies heavily depend on third-party cloud providers and AWS is the dominant player.
Although Okta is specialized in identity management software, it has also been dipping its toes into other areas such as two-factor authentication and mobile device management, seeking to widen its scope. As larger companies are starting to have more applications across a number of divisions, this could prove to be an important advantage.
Okta previously raised $75 million back in 2015, at a valuation of nearly $1.2 billion, and was expected to go public in a year or so. 2016 was a bad year for IPOs, however, but with things now picking up, the IPO scene is starting to look more promising.
