TOM KEMP'S CENTRIFY BLOG

Another Major Company Milestone: $15 Million in Series C Funding

Friday, April 20, 2007

On April 18 we announced another major company milestone: the raising of $15 million in Series C funding. To date, Centrify has raised $36 million in venture funding from some of the leading venture capitalists in the world. This makes Centrify the most well funded company focused on delivering cross-platform interoperability and integration of Windows systems with non-Microsoft platforms such as Linux, and I believe it makes us the most well funded identity and access management software vendor in the market since Oblix.

As was the case with our prior round of funding, we are pleased this was a nice "up" round, thus representing increased value that we are generating with investors. New investor Sigma Partners joined existing investors Mayfield Fund, Accel Partners and INVESCO Private Capital in this round. The funding round was over-subscribed, and we were fortunate enough to be able to select from multiple term sheets.

One of the questions I was asked most frequently by reporters who wrote about this announcement (articles appeared in TheDeal, Private Equity Week, VentureBeat, and the San Jose Business Journal for example) involved the major company accomplishments since we raised our last round of financing in July of 2005, a year and three quarters ago. To my mind the answer is four-fold:

• Great customer traction — growing from a few dozen to 200 customers, including 10 of the Fortune 50.
• Great sales traction — growing proportionally to our growth in customers.
• Great initial partner traction — building out an initial set of channel and OEM partners.
• Great product expansion — expanding our DirectControl solution to cover more OSes (e.g. first and only to do Group Policies for the Mac) and applications (DB2, Oracle, SAP, etc.) and entering a new market with our DirectAudit solution, thereby now allowing us to offer the broadest suite of Active Directory-centric identity and access management solutions for UNIX/Linux environments.

Accomplishing all this is clearly a great team effort, and we appreciate our partners and customers who are working with us to build Centrify into something really special and have really bought into our vision of enabling a secure, connected computing environment.

As part of Sigma Partner's investment in Centrify, I am also quite excited to have Pete Solvik joining our Board of Directors. Prior to joining Sigma Partners, Pete was senior vice president of Cisco Systems with worldwide responsibility for information technology, Iinternet initiatives and productivity strategy, reporting to CEO John Chambers. As CIO, he managed IT at Cisco for nearly ten years, from January 1993 to September 2002. While at Cisco, Pete was named to the "CIO 100" four times by CIO Magazine, and was chosen as one of "the 25 most powerful executives in Networking" by Network World. So it will be absolutely great to have this "Fortune 50 CIO perspective" as part of the Centrify team.

With the customer, sales, partner and product traction coupled with the significant amount of funding, this clearly means that Centrify is definitely a highly viable and emerging player in the identity and access management market, and we look forward to further driving our presence in this market.

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