Our Investment in Strata: Managing Identity and Access Across All Clouds
Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures @venkyganesan
Sunil Chhaya, Principal at Menlo Ventures @sunilchhaya
The pandemic became a catalyst for digital transformation, driving spectacular tailwinds for cloud adoption. It also created new challenges with identity fragmentation as more users turn to cloud services with their own built-in identity systems. As companies adopt multiple cloud platforms and spin up services, they require consistent identity and access policies for the apps that run on these environments.
The era of multi-cloud identity is here. Strata.io, the newest addition to the Menlo portfolio, enables enterprises to seamlessly unify on-premises and cloud-based authentication and access systems for consistent identity management in multi-cloud environments. The move to multi-cloud has forced a fundamental change in how identity is managed across multiple, distributed platforms and identity systems. Strata is solving this massive fragmentation problem by building a distributed identity fabric that enables consistent user identity and access policies across multiple platforms.
Strata is led by a team of technical founders that have more than 60 years of combined experience. The trinity consists of Eric Olden, CEO, Topher Marie, CTO and Eric Leach, Chief Product Officer. Eric Olden is the co-author of SAML, an open standard that allows identity providers to pass authorization credentials to service providers. Back in his student days at UC Berkeley, he founded Securant (acquired by RSA) before going on to co-found Symplified, the first Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) provider which was also acquired by RSA. We’ve found that successful security companies tend to be led by serial entrepreneurs who are making a second go or even a third as is the case with Eric Olden and Strata.
Between them, they’ve achieved multiple exits and have experience at both the startup and enterprise levels after all holding senior positions at Oracle. Their time at Oracle allowed them to foster a deep understanding of what the Global 2000 enterprise needs.
They are some of the foremost thinkers when it comes to cyber identity. They’ve helped build some of the core products in the market today and their vision and immense credibility have already seen them win a Fortune 25 company. Not bad for a 14-month old startup.
We’re excited to welcome Eric Olden, Topher Marie, Eric Leach, and the entire Strata team to the Menlo portfolio. Strata is empowering enterprises to break identity lock-in and decouple their apps from systems so they can easily move across clouds and identity providers. This unique approach ensures a hybrid cloud strategy and multi-cloud strategy that’s cost-effective and scales with the needs of the enterprise.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an information security discipline that has emerged as a top priority for CSOs. Cybersecurity is also an investing priority of ours. Founder DNA and security products designed for a cloud and multi-cloud future are some of the defining attributes we look for in a security investment. We’ve created a checklist for our security investments that has guided our investments in companies like Abnormal Security, BitSight, Dedrone, Signifyd, Sonrai Security, StackRox and now Strata.
We encourage you to take a read. If you are a founder of a cybersecurity company that displays these attributes, we’d love to hear from you.
