Keyfactor CEO Jordan Rackie describes the coronavirus pandemic period as a "net wash" for the Independence-based provider of machine identity products and services.
Delays in software orders and client onboarding, he said, were balanced by "new and magnified" network security demands born out of a surge in remote working.
Business more recently, by contrast, is decidedly favorable.
Income generated by the privately held company surged 164% in the last 12 months, according to Rackie, who declined to disclose specific revenue figures.
Keyfactor also completed a merger with Swedish company PrimeKey this month and, earlier this year, it closed on a $125 million funding round led by existing investor Insight Partners.
"Insight has now put over $200 million into this combined investment," Rackie said. "And so there's a lot of momentum in this, and there's a lot of infusion capital that we could put to work for R&D and for growth purposes."
Rackie said one of the most exciting aspects of the Keyfactor-PrimeKey combination is the creation of the world's first unified platform for machine identity protection. PrimeKey's specialty is the generation of the cryptographic keys and digital certificates that devices (servers, computers, smartphones, etc.) use to connect and communicate securely with each other.
Keyfactor helps companies manage their certificates and keys — identifying where they exist across the enterprise, ensuring they are updated and being used properly, and automating renewal — to avoid audit failures and costly outages and breaches.
While there are competitors in each of these spaces, "there's never been a company out there that manages them and also has the ability to create the certificates and keys," Rackie said.
He expects that distinction to be a competitive advantage for Keyfactor during a watershed period in the burgeoning machine identity management sector.
In March of last year, "Machine Identity Management" debuted on tech analyst Gartner's 2020 Identity and Access Management Hype Cycle, underscoring the business case for identity management of machines in a world becoming ever more digital and cloud-enabled.
As a whole, the global identity and access management market (IAM) is $13.7 billion, according to Gartner. Rackie estimates that machine identity management currently makes up roughly a third of that — somewhere between $4 billion to $6 billion — but is growing rapidly at 10%-20% per year.
He credits the sheer volume of "low-hanging fruit" as one of the biggest growth drivers. Many companies had developed their own controls for keys and certificates over the years and are now realizing those homegrown technologies and practices can't keep pace with expanding digital ecosystems.
And, even though machine identities (e.g., keys and certificates) continue to outnumber human identities (usernames and passwords), they are often left out of corporate IAM strategies, Rackie said.
"The vast majority of the market, I would say 90%-plus, is untapped."
Along with spawning the first commercial end-to-end machine identity solution, Keyfactor and PrimeKey bring unique assets to their fledging partnership, according to Rackie.
Keyfactor has historically played a larger role in its customer relationships with "kind of a fully managed (cloud) offering," he said, while PrimeKey customers can lease its software and self-manage their digital certificate issuance and validation.
"We're bringing those complementary offerings to this technology community," he said, "which is exciting for our customers."
PrimeKey also has a significant foothold in the government and public-sector marketplace — a boon to the new combined entity, given President Joe Biden's focus cybersecurity.
Finally, Rackie added, while both companies had a global customer base prior to the merger, the vast majority of PrimeKey's 100-person staff is in Europe, and the vast majority of Keyfactor's 200-person staff is in the U.S. Thus, he said, locations of customers for each company were skewed toward their home regions.
"The ability to have operatives now — like the old saying 'feet on the street' — in each of those geographical locations," he said, "was a really attractive thing."
Looking forward, Rackie would not detail Keyfactor's growth targets, but he did say the company is "definitely on a hyper-growth trajectory," buoyed in large part by the Insight Partners investment.
Although a portion of the recent capital infusion went to buy out PrimeKey's previous investor, Rackie claims "a very sizable" sum was put on Keyfactor's balance sheet, where it will be used to scale the organization.
"At the speed that we're growing, we are a company that is more focused on growth and using capital correctly than turning a profit immediately," he said.
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