Today, unified identity threat protection platform provider Silverfort announced that it has closed a $65 million Series C funding round led by Greenfield partners. This brings the organization’s total funding amount to $100 million and will enable the company to scale its team globally. 

Silverfort’s solution offers enterprises and technical decision makers Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) and Identity Threat Prevention (ITP) capabilities to help them identify and defend against identity-based attacks. 

Essentially, the provider offers a solution that enterprises can use to implement multi-factor authentication, identity threat detection and response, and zero-trust policies for critical data assets in a single location, to ensure there’s end-to-end identity protection. 

The need to secure identities 

The announcement comes as hackers are beginning to favor targeting identities over IT infrastructure. As of last year, compromised credentials were the most common initial attack vector involved in data breaches, contributing to 20% of all breaches at an average cost of $4.37 million. 

One of the main reasons why attackers are gravitating toward compromising user identities and credentials over targeting devices or other vulnerabilities is that most enterprises have inconsistent approaches to Identity and Access Management (IAM), that provide a valuable entry point. 

“Most companies use a combination of a few different IAM solutions — one (or more) for the legacy on-premises environment, one (or more) for cloud applications, one for remote employee access, one for privileged access management (PAM), etc. Each of these solutions covers only a specific portion of corporate resources and access scenarios,” said CEO and cofounder of Silverfort, Hed Kovetz. 

“These solutions are usually provided by competing vendors, so they don’t operate together in any way, and provide inconsistent security controls, visibility, and user experience,” Kovetz said. 

Silverfort addresses this challenge by unifying multiple IAM solutions into a single platform, translating authentication and access protocols to enable enterprises to manage all of their security controls in one place. 

It  also offers a unique approach to protecting non-human identities, by automatically discovering machine identities throughout the network, and suggesting to the human security team what access policies each account should be restricted to. 

The journey to simplify identity management 

Silverfort is part of the fast-growing IAM market, which researchers valued at $13.41 billion last year, and anticipate will reach a valuation of $34.52 billion in 2028 amid rising compliance and security concerns.

One of Silverfort’s main competitors is leading access management provider Okta, that offers admins a centralized location to manage user access to IT resources that syncs with external identity solutions including AD, LDAP, and HR systems.

Okta is one of the biggest providers in the market, recently announcing a total revenue of $383 million last year. 

Another competitor is Auth0, which offers an authentication platform that allows users to define access-roles for applications and APIs, which raised $120 million as part of a Series F funding round led by Salesforce Ventures, raising a total of $330 million and achieving a valuation of $1.92 billion in 2020. 

While Silverfort is technically competing against these providers, Kovetz says that the company’s aim isn’t necessarily to compete with other IAM and authentication products, but to collaborate with them and extend the levels of protection they offer. 

Silverfort’s “vendor-neutral ‘identity consolidation’ approach puts it in a unique position in the ecosystem, and allows it to build strong alliances,” Kovetz said.