ForgeRock made a major investment announcement today. A $15 Million Series B round of venture capital financing was secured, led by Foundation Capital and participated in by Accel Partners. ForgeRock is based in San Francisco and is a leader in open source identity and access management solutions. Their product allows for modern, secure access methods in cloud, mobile, and enterprise environments. The funding will go towards continued development of their prime Open Identity Stack product, grow sales and continue its global expansion. In a briefing with ForgeRock CEO Mike Ellis, he described this exponentially growing market and the numerous use cases they engage with.

ForgeRock has nearly 200 customers on board in over 135 countries. The solution is an open source software answer to identity and access that applies to countless scenarios. This is an increasingly important aspect of cloud computing in that as architecture transforms, having a single identity within an ever-increasing amount of systems is very much a must-have. Organizations are adopting cloud services and utilizing hybrid, public, and private strategies that are quite often characterized by numerous egresses, through various geo-disparate instances, and accessed from a countless number of devices from any number of locations. It’s these types of situations that make this market so hot – imagine having to encumber users with various identities or even worse, having to manage it. ForgeRock’s solution extends out into all these types of environments and also mobile applications and SaaS applications. The name of the game here is simplification, manageability, scalability, and capability – all rather critical aspects of a fully working solution. ForgeRock has proven this time and again with government organizations and with other clients in such demanding industries as healthcare and financial to name a couple.

ForgeRock’s announcement means continued growth possibilities for a solid identity product designed especially for enterprise situations in today’s evolving infrastructures.

Their press release is below:

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – April 9, 2013 – ForgeRock Inc., the pioneer of open source identity and access management (IAM), today announced it has closed a $15 million Series B round of financing led by Foundation Capital with additional participation from existing investor Accel Partners. The new round brings the company’s total funding to $22 million, and will be used to fuel the development of ForgeRock’s Open Identity Stack, grow sales, and continue its global expansion. In addition to closing the funding round, Warren Weiss, general partner with Foundation Capital, will join the board of advisors.

“As CIOs shift investment from employee to consumer-focused identity services, there is a greater need for an IAM stack that can stand up to the requirements of cloud, social, mobile and extended enterprise environments, and it is clear ForgeRock is uniquely positioned to meet this need,” said Warren Weiss, general partner, Foundation Capital. “I look forward to joining the ForgeRock board and working with them to continue the mission of providing easy-to-deploy and massively scalable IAM to fuel secure collaboration across the contemporary web.”

The company’s Series B follows last month’s release of the latest version of ForgeRock’s Open Identity Stack, the only unified, 100% open source identity stack to secure applications and services across private, hybrid, and public clouds, as well as SaaS, mobile, and enterprise systems. The new release of the platform includes the latestversions of OpenAM and OpenIDM, extending platform flexibility by adding a single, unified REST API across the entire stack for building common identity services across consumer, mobile, social, and enterprise applications.
“ForgeRock’s success in securing approximately 200 customers in less than 3 years and more than 300,000 downloads in over 135 countries positions it as the leading open identity and access management stack on the market,” said Bruce Golden, partner at Accel Partners. “We look forward to helping the company continue to expand its presence globally and disrupt traditional approaches to IAM by developing a new IAM architecture that solves today’s enterprise challenges.”

“In the past year, our growth across enterprise, cloud, social, and mobile environments has increased significantly. We are changing the relationship between businesses and their consumers, driving new business models and improved customer knowledge and trust,” said Mike Ellis, ForgeRock CEO. “In this round, it was important that we partner with investors that understand the profound transformation currently taking place in the identity market and the massive opportunity arising from this change. With Accel Partners and Foundation Capital we have found that fit.”