Cybersecurity Firm Auth0 Raises $120M In Salesforce-Led Funding

The Series F funding raises Auth0’s valuation to $1.92 billion, and will allow the identity security vendor to establish a direct presence in emerging markets like India, Southeast Asia, the Nordics and Central Europe, according to CEO Eugenio Pace.

Auth0 has closed a $120 million funding round to grow its presence in underpenetrated markets and add new functionality to its identity platform.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based cybersecurity vendor said the Series F funding will allow Auth0 to establish a direct presence in emerging markets like India, Southeast Asia, the Nordics and Central Europe rather than serving customers in those countries from offices in London, Tokyo or Sydney, according to co-founder and CEO Eugenio Pace. The funding round was led by new investor Salesforce Ventures.

“This will allow us to be bolder in some of our strategies and not be so cautious,” Pace told CRN.

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The Series F funding comes just 14 months after Auth0 closed a $103 million Series E round led by Sapphire Ventures, who also participated in the latest funding round. Pace last year thought the Series E funding would be sufficient, but realized in recent months that Auth0 would be able to further expand its market presence and product capabilities with another round of funding.

All told, Auth0 said it has raised more than $330 million in seven rounds of outside funding, and has now notched a valuation of $1.92 billion. Auth0 has grown its headcount by 40 percent over the past year from 505 employees a year ago to 707 employees today, with the biggest expansion coming in the sales organization, which has increased its headcount by 85 percent over the past year, according to LinkedIn.

Auth0 is primarily looking to hire for sales, marketing and customer success roles in the regions where it doesn’t have a physical presence today, Pace said. The company has always had a strong global orientation and today conducts half of its business outside the Americas, but Pace said there are still a lot of markets where Auth0 doesn’t currently have any boots on the ground.

“When we have a direct presence in those regions, we do better and move faster,” Pace said. “For everything that’s customer oriented, we like to be as close to the customer as possible.”

From a technology standpoint, Pace said he’d like to expand Auth0’s ability to examine traffic and determine what’s legitimate and what’s illegitimate based on spotting anomalies such as an abnormal log in location. By coming up with additional ways to verify that a user is who they say they are, Pace said Auth0 will be able to protect applications even better.

Auth0 last year acquired a small company that looked at network level reputation and email domain reputation. Now that the company has a stronger balance sheet thanks to the Series F found, Pace said Auth0 will either make additional acquisitions or double down on its own engineering capabilities to expand its technological prowess.

From a channel perspective, Pace said Auth0 has made strong inroads with global systems integrators (SIs) such as Wipro, and relies heavily on partners to bring its product to market in regions like Europe, Southeast Asia and Japan. Proceeds from the Series F round will allow Auth0 to better train and enable solution providers as the company builds out a channel model, according to Pace.

“The funding gives us additional protection and cushion to do more things,” Pace said.