Beyond Identity Raises $75M To Push Passwordless Security

‘[Our investors] really wanted us to be able to go forward at full throttle without having to look over our shoulder and wonder where the funding was going to come from,’ says Beyond Identity CEO TJ Jermoluk.

Identity management startup Beyond Identity has closed its Series B funding round to expand into Europe and Asia and grow its business with OEM and channel partners.

The New York-based company said its $75 million funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) and will allow Beyond Identity to roll out new features, partnerships and positions slated for 2021 or 2022. The accelerated road map was prompted by high demand for the company’s passwordless identity platform since debuting in April.

“They [our investors] really wanted us to be able to go forward at full throttle without having to look over our shoulder and wonder where the funding was going to come from,” Beyond Identity CEO TJ Jermoluk told CRN.

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Beyond Identity was founded in 2019, employs more than 70 people, and has now raised $105 million in two rounds of outside funding. The Series B round comes just eight months after a $30 million Series A round also led by NEA and KDT. The Series B funding should last until 2023, at which point Jermoluk said Beyond Identity expects to be a cash-flow-positive business.

The company has sold exclusively in North America since launching earlier this year, but would like to have 20 percent of its sales coming from abroad by the end of 2022, according to Jermoluk. Europe has been the source of many inbound requests, and Jermoluk said the European Union is actually ahead of the U.S. in terms of government requirements around compliance and user privacy.

Beyond Identity plans to start its international expansion in Europe since the entire continent can be serviced from a centralized location in the United Kingdom, and then move into Asia six to 12 months later where a separate brick-and-mortar presence is required in countries like China, Japan and Korea, according to Jermoluk.

The company also wants to push beyond its baseline of large enterprise and upper midmarket customers and start supporting smaller organizations without a large IT infrastructure, Jermoluk said. As Beyond Identity pushes downmarket, Jermoluk said the company’s product needs to be 100 percent turnkey so that small businesses can install it on their own with very limited touch from the vendor.

From a technical standpoint, Jermoluk said Beyond Identity is looking to tightly integrate its product with OEM partners like ForgeRock, Okta and Ping Identity as well as larger VARs and systems integrators. This will require constructing the product in a way that aligns both the user and admin portals as well as the IT interfaces with technology and channel partners, according to Jermoluk.

As far as the channel is concerned, Beyond Identity has gone to market pretty much entirely direct in its first several months, but in time wants most of its sales flowing through channel partners, according to Kurt Johnson, vice president of strategy and business development. The share of business going through the channel could be even larger in highly regulated verticals like banking and health care, Jermoluk said.

Beyond Identity has agreements in place with eight boutique security and identity partners, and Johnson said it is looking to add more solution providers across the board from boutiques and consultancies like Trace3 to security resellers like Optiv, GuidePoint Security and Sirius and eventually global systems integrators with very sophisticated identity management practices.

The company plans to use the Series B proceeds to engage in joint lead generation activities with the channel, build out a partner marketing engine, and hold virtual and (once it’s safe) in-person events alongside solution providers, Johnson said. Beyond Identity has already hired its first channel-specific support team, Jermoluk said, and plans to bring in more sales engineers and channel account managers.

“We understand what it takes to build an effective channel and support that effectively,” Johnson said.