OneLogin
Brad Brooks, CEO of OneLogin
- Unified access management startup OneLogin announced on Thursday that it raised $100 million in new funding.
- OneLogin, which is used by customers like Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), says its annual recurring revenue nearly triple in the last three years.
- OneLogin's major competitors are Okta and Microsoft.
- Brad Brooks became CEO of OneLogin in 2017 after the founders realized they needed a more experienced CEO to scale the company.
When you're working at a startup, speed matters, and every second counts. Everything could come crashing down at any moment, says Brad Brooks, CEO of OneLogin - but the rewards for making it through are huge.
"Every day can bring that challenge," Brooks told Business Insider. "But you look at the market and you look at what you can trust in, and the future looks good."
That's what OneLogin, a cloud-based identity and access management software company, is dealing with as it races to keep up with the pace of its own growth, he says. On Thursday, the startup announced it raised $100 million in funding led by new investor Greenspring Associates and existing investors Charles River Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.
OneLogin recently added the Bay Area Rapid Transit as a customer and says its annual recurring revenue has nearly tripled in the past three years, though it declines to disclose the specifics of its financials. As more companies move to the cloud and as OneLogin grew, the co-founder and former CEO Thomas Pedersen realized he needed to find a more experienced person in
Brooks, who headed up product, engineering and marketing at DocuSign, has also worked at Microsoft and Juniper Networks - experience that the company hopes will prove handy as it moves to compete head on with big players like Microsoft and Okta.
Still, Brooks believes OneLogin's biggest competitor is awareness, Many customers still don't fully comprehend what it means to move to the cloud, and there's a learning curve.
"The Number One thing I figured out in my life is that working in a market where everyone needs your technology is a really good career move," Brooks said. "This is the next generation of technology that everyone needs."
Raising money is one of a CEOs hardest jobs
The San Francisco-based company has raised $170 million in total since it was founded in 2009.
Raising money, Brooks said, is one of the hardest jobs a CEO does, but at the end, it feels good. Now, with the funding, OneLogin will focus on increasing adoption of its new products, as well as expanding in North America and Europe.
"[Investors are] going to be very cynical in your business so you've really got to know the process inside out," Brooks said. "You've got to test your belief. At the end of the day, investors will say they want to invest in the latest and greatest technology, but at the end of the day, they invest in the people."
On the upside, although so many companies have yet to move to the cloud, they likely will in the near future.
"All those comes with its own set of challenges and making sure we don't overextend ourselves," Brooks said. "We're not nearly as small as you think we are. We're much bigger than we think we are and are here to stay."
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