High-profile cybersecurity firm Centrify Inc. today said the private equity giant Thoma Bravo is acquiring a “significant” majority stake in the company.

Thoma Bravo, which has been investing in several cybersecurity firms such as Bomgar and Sailpoint in the last few years and bought security firm Barracuda Networks in November for $1.6 billion, is buying the stake for an undisclosed price from Mayfield, Accel Partners, Jackson Square Ventures and Index Ventures.

Essentially, the deal constitutes an acquisition of the Santa Clara, California-based company, at least according to the wording used in a LinkedIn post today by Mayfield venture partner Robin Vasan, though the company won’t say how big the stake is. However, co-founder and Chief Executive Tom Kemp (pictured) told SiliconANGLE in an interview that Thoma Bravo is also adding money to Centrify’s balance sheet.

Kemp said in a blog post that he think the deal will allow the company to accelerate its innovation in what’s known as “privileged access management” and “identity as a service,” and it has particularly emphasized a vision of “zero trust” security. That shifts access controls from the perimeter of an organization to individual devices and users, allowing employees to work securely from any location without depending on a traditional virtual private network, firewalls or antivirus software.

The deal also positions Centrify to make its own acquisitions. That’s something it couldn’t do before in growing from its own revenue, Kemp said, since the last time the company raised money was five years ago. It had raised a total of $94 million since it was founded in 2004.

“It’s nice timing because we wanted to raise some more money to grow further,” he said. Centrify intended to do a traditional venture round, but as it talked to Thoma Bravo, the larger deal looked most advantageous. “Thoma Bravo has a big checkbook and they can allow us to do even bigger acquisitions.”

Kemp said the deal is similar in kind to Thoma Bravo’s majority stake in Sailpoint, which then went public in November four years after the deal.

The CEO made a point of saying that the company, which employs a little under 500 people, didn’t do the deal out of necessity. He said it just closed a “very successful” fiscal year with record quarterly bookings, with overall revenue “well above $100 million” and growth of 25 to 30 percent the last few years.

“We believe this is a strategic next step for Centrify,” he said. “We have no intention of taking our foot off the pedal.” For customers, he added, “There will be no change in day-to-day operations.”

However, the crush of new security startups and investments in recent years has made the market a tough place to make money, and many have run into trouble. “There is definitely buyer fatigue,” Sean Cunningham, managing director of ForgePoint Capital, said in a recent interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio. Of the nearly 1,700 cybersecurity startups his firm tracks, some 1,500 “are about technology for the sake of technology” rather than solving a real problem.

Carl Press, a principal at Thoma Bravo, said Centrify sets itself apart because it “offers products across the entire continuum of identity access management through a cutting-edge, natively built cloud platform.”

The transaction is set to close in the third quarter.

Kemp spoke to theCUBE about Centrify and the security market at the company’s CyberConnect conference in November in New York City:

Photo: SiliconANGLE