ForgeRock has raised $30 million to expand its IRM platform

ForgeRock, a company with European roots (UK and Nordics) but now global operations, has become a player in what has become known as – tortuously – “IRM” (identity relationship management). This is a jargony way of saying it tracks customers and the stuff they use and buy, but as you can imagine, this is becoming incredibly complex and the old ways of doing it re changing rapidly. Today it’s announced a $30 million Series C funding round which they claim was oversubscribed. Meritech Capital Partners led the round and existing investors Accel Partners and Foundation Capital also participated. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to $52 million, cash which will be used to built out product and marketing. ForgeRock has developed what it calls an ‘open, unified, massively scalable identity relationship management platform’ to address this identity issue. Founded in 2010 and built on Sun Microsystems’ open-source identity projects, it thinks organisations need a new type of identity platform now that the ‘Internet of people, devices and things’ is exploding. It’s primary competition is Oracle, CA and IBM. However, Mike Ellis, CEO of ForgeRock says: “The legacy platforms vendors were built over the last 10-15 years to solve internal, employee centric identity– small populations primarily behind the firewall. As an open source vendor we built our platform through R&D… We figured out how to transform identity from an internal, employee centric technology focused on lowering support costs and compliance to an external, customer-centric platform focused on driving revenue and growing brand equity.”