Azuqua CEO Todd Owens (Azuqua Photo)

Okta, which helps companies manage how employees access sensitive corporate resources, has agreed to acquire Seattle’s Azuqua for $52.5 million in cash, Okta announced Thursday as part of its fourth-quarter earnings release.

Azuqua, ranked #90 on the GeekWire 200 as of the acquisition, had raised $16 million in venture funding from investors such as DFJ, Insight Venture Partners and Ignition Partners, according to Crunchbase. Founded in 2014, Azuqua has been developing tools that let companies building software-as-a-service applications connect their services to other SaaS services without having to write custom code, connecting two growing trends in enterprise software: no-code or low-code development platforms and the open nature of modern enterprise apps.

“Together, we will provide organizations with a neutral, independent control center for automating the flow of identities between applications and services for everyone in an organization — from employees to partners, and customers,” said Frederic Kerrest, Okta co-founder and chief operating officer, in a blog post announcing the deal. Fortune reported that Okta acquired the company for $52.5 million, which a company representative later confirmed.

“You should think about this as a technology acquisition,” said Okta co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon on a conference call discussing the acquisition with mildly skeptical analysts concerned about the financial impact of the deal. It sounds like Okta plans to integrate Azuqua’s technology across existing products and use it to develop new ones in order to keep growing.

San Francisco-based Okta went public in 2017 on the back of its single sign-on technology that competes with Microsoft’s Active Directory in helping companies manage how employees access different parts of their corporate networks. The company has yet to turn a profit and disappointed investors Thursday with a lower earnings forecast for the upcoming year, according to Marketwatch.

Azuqua had 40 employees based mostly in downtown Seattle at the time of the deal, according to an Okta representative. Okta has an office in Bellevue and the plan is for those employees to join their new counterparts across the lake, the representative said.

[Editor’s note: This post was updated several times as more information became available.]

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