Cloud security vendor Okta hits $2bn valuation after IPO

Vendor expected to see greater success in Europe as GDPR approaches

Cloud security vendor Okta saw its valuation rise to over $2bn after floating on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

On its first day of trading, Okta saw its share price rise more than 38 per cent, raising $187m, reports Yahoo Finance.

Based in San Francisco, Okta is an identity and mobile management specialist and was last valued at $1.2bn, following a $75m Series F funding round in 2015.

Rumours of an IPO began circulating following the Series F round, which Okta said would be partly used to grow its European operation.

In a joint blog post co-founders Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest said: "Okta's identity makes us confident in our ability to answer to the public with honesty and transparency, to grow and scale wisely, to innovate and solve our customers' most intractable problems, to create a workplace that supports growth, diversity and meaningful work, and to make technology easier and friendlier for everyone to use."

Okta is not yet profitable, reporting a loss of $83.7m for the 12 months ending 31 January 2017. Revenue was however up 87 per cent year on year to $160m.

Bob Tarzey, analyst at Quocirca, said we can expect to see a greater UK presence from Okta this year - particularly with GDPR looming.

"To my knowledge they have been active in Europe for a few years but I'm not sure how substantial an operation it's been compared with their competitor," he said. "Certainly the IPO should help them raise money and put pressure on them to expand in Europe further.

"Identity and access management is a hot space in general terms; single sign-on is a powerful tool to solve access problems and one driver which is adding a lot of pressure is GDPR.

"You can outsource a lot of the requirements of GDPR if you're doing things like email campaigns; so you can go to on-demand suppliers that build security into their platforms and they will provide you with the administrative capabilities to be GDPR compliant - all that only works if you have tight access to the control of your systems.

"An on-demand offering such as Okta is quite appealing so I think there's a good opportunity for the whole space this year. Okta is a purely on-demand company so I think it has the right products in the right place to succeed. It's a well-known name in the space, regardless of how often it gets mentioned over here, so it's exciting times for Okta."