Security, meet CX: Why we invested in Strivacity

These days, consumers are more likely to enter their favorite businesses through a digital front door than a physical one. This creates a unique challenge for companies: how can they ensure a seamless and easy online experience for their customers while also keeping their customers’ personal information secure? It's a delicate balancing act between providing convenience and safety. On one hand, the CMO wants to make the registration and sign-in process as easy as possible, removing friction and allowing customers to create accounts, sign in, and use their services in novel ways. On the other hand, the CISO’s responsibility is to ensure there are no data breaches or hacked accounts. This tension creates an extremely difficult business problem in today’s digital-first world. Companies have two options:

• Tighten the system too much and you see new customer registrations, usage, and conversion rates plummet.
  • One leading national hotel chain implemented one-size-fits-all multi-factor authentication (MFA), increasing friction for their users: revenue fell 11%.
• Relax the constraints and your brand risks being a front-page headline and losing customer confidence.
  • Account takeover (ATO) has become an increasingly prevalent issue in recent years. Account takeover fraud losses reached $3 billion in 2022, according to Javelin Research—and that doesn’t include reputational damage.

Enter Strivacity—a new kind of customer identity and access management (CIAM) software provider, designed around a cloud-based "configuration-as-code" offering. Because of its architecture, business-critical changes can be made without needing expensive and time-consuming engineering resources. This allows the CMO or Head of Digital to experiment and iterate quickly on customer experience (CX) workflows, while the CISO can rest assured that the underlying authentication system is secure and automatically kept current with associated enterprise infrastructure. Due to this flexibility, Strivacity can ensure its CIAM platform will meet the needs of the enterprise C-suite and revenue-function owners. This makes it unlike most existing solutions, which are tailored almost exclusively to the technical teams inside a large organization.

That’s why SignalFire is excited to lead Strivacity’s latest $20M investment round.

One size doesn’t fit all

Strivacity understands that workforce identity and customer identity solutions have very different security and user experience needs. Instead of trying to cram these solutions together, Strivacity focuses solely on the needs of customer identity management and has been deliberate in its approach to building a seamless CIAM platform. From a single console, an administrator is able to control and orchestrate registration, sign-in and authentication, identity verification, consent management (for data privacy), and ongoing fraud prevention. Other providers have stitched these capabilities together via M&A alongside an alphabet soup of modules for workforce identity management (PAM, IGA, IDTR, etc.), resulting in disjointed architectures and significant engineering and consulting maintenance costs. In fact, during our due diligence, one enterprise customer estimated that Strivacity provides a 30% annual total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction versus their legacy vendor.

“We started Strivacity because we saw a familiar and frustrating story replaying itself over and over at Fortune 1000 companies. Workforce-centric identity solution providers were force-fitting their products to serve customer use cases. The results were invariably monthslong rollouts that ended with organizations settling for poor customer experiences and writing big checks for after-market services,” said Keith Graham, Strivacity’s co-founder and CEO.

An all-star team for identity security

Strivacity’s founders, Keith Graham (CEO) and Stephen Cox (CTO), have been working together on enterprise cybersecurity solutions for more than ten years, most recently leading teams at SecureAuth and Mandiant. In fact, Kevin Mandia (founder and CEO of Mandiant) was so impressed with the product vision and early customer traction, he invested and joined their board of directors. 

Jack Huffard (co-founder and former COO of Tenable) invested alongside SignalFire, and joined Strivacity as Executive Chairman. We have been working with Jack as part of our XIR program for about a year to find an innovative cybersecurity company that was re-imagining “identity” solutions for the enterprise—and to our good fortune, we found Strivacity.

“With Strivacity, improving security with customers doesn’t require increasing friction for users. They’re pioneering a new approach to customer identity and access management (CIAM) that’s synchronized with marketing to let enterprises optimize both in tandem. Between SignalFire’s recruiting and growth help, my experience scaling Tenable into a public company, and the Strivacity founders’ vision for the future of CIAM, we can vastly improve the security and experience customers have with the brands they trust."

—Jack Huffard, Chairman of Strivacity, Co-Founder of Tenable (NASDAQ:TENB), SignalFire XIR

As they were looking for their next investor, Keith and Stephen wanted a partner who would actively help them scale the business. Keith shared:

We are thrilled to be partnering with this team and co-investing with Todd Weber (former CTO of Optiv), partner at TenEleven Ventures. With this unparalleled group of cybersecurity experts around the table, and an innovative approach to orchestration, we believe Strivacity is the future of CIAM.

The market is voting…

We’re not alone in our opinion of this product and team—industry analysts and early customers are raving about them as well. Strivacity is the only startup recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Identity and Access Management, Q2 2022. And on the customer side, leading enterprises across gaming, online education, financial services, and consumer software rely on Strivacity to manage their customer registration, sign-in, and privacy workflows.Strivacity is faster to deploy, easier to support, and more comprehensive than any other CIAM solution in the market. The balance of simple and customizable CX with strong cybersecurity is a delicate one. With Strivacity, that balancing act becomes cheaper, faster, and easier to achieve. Finally: something that both the business side and the IT side of an enterprise can agree on.

*SignalFire may engage Affiliate Advisors, Retained Advisors, and other consultants as listed above to provide their expertise on a formal or ad hoc basis. They are not employed by SignalFire and do not provide investment advisory services to clients on behalf of SignalFire. For more information on their specific roles, please contact us.

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