Auth0, a Bellevue, Wash. startup that helps developers build identity authentication capabilities into their applications, raised $55 million to embark on global expansion.
The Series D round was led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from World Innovation Lab and past investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Meritech Capital and K9 Ventures. The five-year-old company has now raised $110 million in its lifetime.
Auth0’s platform includes services like single sign-on, two-factor authentication, password-free login capabilities and the ability to detect password breaches. As companies add dozens of internal and external cloud services to their enterprise software toolboxes, ensuring security and compliance across all those services becomes much harder, and single sign-on products help manage that complexity.
Co-founder Eugenio Pace leads Auth0, taking over the CEO position in December after the previous chief executive Jon Gelsey stepped down. The management change came less than six months after the company landed a $30 million funding round.
There are a lot of big players in this market: Okta went public in 2016 and has been growing steadily, and Pace’s former employer Microsoft also enjoys a fair amount of business in this market with its Active Directory product.
Auth0, which was named a Seattle 10 company in 2016, has already experienced international success. Gelsey told GeekWire last year that more than half its revenue comes from customers in foreign countries. In 2017, Auth0 opened new offices in London, Sydney and Tokyo.
The company said it had a banner year in 2017, doubling its customer count and reporting revenue growth of 100 percent. The company hired 140 people last year and currently employs about 350. The company plans to add another couple hundred people by the end of the year.
