Clear Skye raises $14 million to close the gap between identity and business processes
Clear Skye announced that the company has completed a $14 million Series A funding round, bringing total funding for the company to nearly $20 million since its initial seed round in 2020.
This latest investment was co-led by Storm Ventures and Toba Capital with participation from Point Field Partners and Inner Loop Capital.
The company will use these funds to expand its team, global footprint, and to continue reimagining the approach to enterprise identity governance and security. To achieve this, the company has expanded its leadership team welcoming a new CMO, Erin Duncan, who previously led product marketing at Saviynt; Jackson Shaw, Chief Strategy Officer, who led product management at Dell, One Identity, and Forcepoint; Mike Tierney, Senior Vice President, Customer Success; and Jen Ilsley, Vice President, HR and Operations. Arun Penmetsa, Partner at Storm Ventures, will join Clear Skye’s board.
This news comes on the heels of Clear Skye’s record growth in 2021, driven by the demand for improved data compliance, workflow management, and security to meet the needs of a distributed, cloud-first workforce. Strategic, customer-driven product updates and new capabilities enabled the company to achieve 5x revenue growth last year. As a result, the company’s growing customer base includes ABB, West Fraser, Blackhawk Network, Premise Health, and more, who use Clear Skye to power their identity strategies.
“As the only IGA solution built natively on ServiceNow, Clear Skye has the unique ability to remove friction from business processes related to governing application access, all while increasing efficiency and extending our customers’ investments in their existing business platform,” said John Milburn, CEO, Clear Skye. “Effective and easy to use, Clear Skye eliminates the burdens associated with massive tech overhauls and starts delivering value immediately.”
“Today, workers have access to many more applications, which poses a challenge for identity and governance teams that are tasked with access control, managing compliance, and monitoring individual and enterprise-wide threats. Clear Skye addresses this need through a modern platform without the pain of replacing legacy IT systems,” said Arun Penmetsa, Partner, Storm Ventures. “Our investment in the company reinforces our belief in the value of extending identity beyond risk and security to embrace enhanced operations and IT workflows that improve overall business outcomes.”
The identity security market is expected to reach over $11 billion by 2025, but today, it’s dominated by siloed, on-premises solutions. In fact, 76% of customers are looking to replace their existing IGA solution, according to Gartner. It’s easy to see why; on average it takes an organization several days to weeks to remove access and weeks to months to complete an audit. Clear Skye enables companies to carry out these functions in just hours, empowering employees with what they need to get their job done and avoiding organizational silos that lead to disconnect or compromised data.
“Since working with Clear Skye, we’ve been able to simplify, standardize, and automate a manual process that took countless hours, dozens of spreadsheets, and hundreds of manual emails,” said Suneetha Golla, Director, Identity and Access Management, Premise Health. “Not only have we been able to reduce cost and increase security, but we significantly improved the lives of our team members responsible for user access.”
Industry recognition of Clear Skye includes being named an inaugural Gartner Cool Vendor in Identity-First Security and a spot on the analyst firm’s Heat Index for “SaaS Delivered IAM” in the Security, Risk and Identity Management category. In Q2 the company will issue the results of its inaugural ‘State of Identity Management Report’ in partnership with research firm Gradient Flow. The research will help shed light on the benefits, trends, and challenges practitioners are facing when it comes to managing identity.