Machine identity management leader names Sandeep Singh Kohli as chief marketing officer
Venafi®, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today announced that the company has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), cementing its leadership as category creator. This news comes on the heels of Thoma Bravo’s strategic growth investment in Venafi, valuing the company at $1.15 billion in December 2020. Venafi is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the rapid growth of machine identity management within security markets, and to that end, the company has appointed Sandeep Singh Kohli as chief marketing officer.
“We invented machine identity management, and the market is growing incredibly fast,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi. “Machines use identities to gain access just like humans use identities. Digital transformation is driving an explosion in the number of machines, and we solve the problems that this explosion is creating. If these problems aren’t solved, systems fail and vulnerabilities multiply. It is getting worse because the perimeter has evaporated, and security now is fundamentally based on identity. Additionally, the speed of business is so fast that security has to be built in at the time of development. Everything is moving to the cloud and microservices architectures. As the innovators and inventors, we are leading the charge to reshape security to be led by developers.”
Hudson continued: “To help us drive this industry transformation, I am excited to announce that Sandeep Singh Kohli has joined our organization as CMO. He is a transformative leader with deep experience bringing solutions to development teams. In addition, Sandeep has an excellent track record building high-performance teams and scaling world-class companies. His experience and skillset are a perfect fit for Venafi as we expand the market and continue to accelerate our growth.”
Before joining Venafi, Kohli led global marketing at Kong, where he built a high performing go-to-market team and scaled the company from early stage to unicorn – 1,908 percent revenue growth in three years. Before joining Kong, he led global platform marketing at MuleSoft, establishing it as a category leader, and helped scale the business from pre-IPO into one of the fastest-growing public enterprise software companies. At Venafi, Kohli will lead all global marketing initiatives, with a special focus appealing to the growing demand for automated machine identity management solutions that increase collaboration between developers and InfoSec teams.
A majority of Venafi’s rapid growth in 2020 was driven by delivering solutions that offer frictionless machine identity management for developers. This solution capitalizes on the rapid shift to microservice architectures, which address key concerns for application developers such as speed, agility and modernization. According to Gartner, Inc., by 2022 more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.
In addition, the company acquired Jetstack, the global leader in open source machine identity management software for Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems, in May 2020. Cert-manager, Jetstack’s open source solution for certificate management, now receives over two million downloads per day. Venafi also doubled the number of projects participating in the Machine Identity Management Development Fund and launched the Indie Developers Program to expand the pace of machine identity management innovation.
Expanding into this new market was accomplished while the firm continued to expand on the organization’s market-leading enterprise-grade machine identity management solutions that solve network security and reliability goals. The urgent need for automated, scalable machine identity management solutions is starkly illustrated by the nation-state attack on SolarWinds that ultimately impacted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. State Department, NASA, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, Ford, Visa, MasterCard, Hertz and Cisco, as well as many other organizations.
“Security is shifting into the software development environment and creating a whole new set of market opportunities,” said Sandeep Singh Kohli, CMO at Venafi. “Venafi created the machine identity management category, and we’re building momentum in Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems. As a marketer, these kinds of inflection points are really exciting. The combination of this unique market opportunity and Venafi’s laser focus on growth, innovation and dedication to customer success means the opportunities ahead of us are really unlimited. I’m honored to be a part of this team as we embark on the next chapter.”
Digital transformation is driving a dramatic increase in machine-to-machine communication, which can only be secured using machine identities to authorize secure communications. Forrester estimates that machine identities are growing twice as fast as human identities across most organizations. This massive proliferation in the number and types of machine identities and the minimal security controls that typically surround them have triggered a corresponding 400% increase in the frequency of attacks targeting them. Unmanaged and poorly protected machine identities already cause $15 billion to $21 billion in economic losses in the United States.
