Identity Security Firm Saviynt Lands $205 Million, Ex-CEO Returns

Saviynt, which recently shifted its midmarket sales to a channel-only model, announced that founder Sachin Nayyar has re-assumed the role of CEO.

Saviynt Founder Sachin Nayyar has returned as its CEO.

Saviynt, which offers what it calls a “converged identity platform,” disclosed it has raised $205 million in new funding that’s intended in part to help accelerate its sales through channel partners, according to founder Sachin Nayyar, who has also returned as CEO of the company.

Nayyar, who had previously served as CEO of Saviynt until 2018, will succeed Amit Saha, who has moved into the position of chief growth officer.

Starting on Jan. 1, El Segundo, California-based Saviynt switched its midmarket accounts to a 100-percent channel model, Nayyar told CRN.

“We’ve made that big internal shift,” Nayyar said, adding that he and software industry veteran Paul Zolfaghari — who has been newly named president at Saviynt — are “very keen on focusing on the channel and making sure the channel is enabled.”

[Related: New Securonix CEO Nayaki Nayyar Vows Close Relationship With Channel]

The new round of funding will be invested in part in hiring of new staff for the company’s channel-facing team, according to Nayyar. The company is aiming to boost its revenue from “channel-led and influenced deals” by 300 percent in 2023 compared to last year, he said.

The new funding round came from AB Private Credit Investors, an affiliate of the investment firm AllianceBernstein. The funding is the first round that Saviynt has raised since September 2021, when it disclosed $130 million in new investment. The company said at the time that it had raised $170 million in total funding.

Saviynt has aimed to stand out in the markets for identity security with a platform that enables more-secure management of multiple types of identity access — including corporate workers, privileged users and third-party relationships such as suppliers and partners, as well as non-human identities such as bots and cloud workloads.

Additionally, with many customers looking to switch to the cloud, “Saviynt is the only enterprise-ready cloud identity solution in the market,” Nayyar said. “We believe that the channel has a key role to play with us to move customers over from legacy identity management providers over to Saviynt.”

At solution provider Inspira Enterprise, which has been partnering with Saviynt since mid-2022, CEO Lalit Ahluwalia said that the fact that Saviynt consolidates so many different identity solutions into one platform is a major advantage. “Our goal is really to overcome the complexities of cybersecurity” on behalf of customers, Ahluwalia said. To get a handle on identity and access privileges sprawl, “you need to be able to bring one unified solution,” he said.

Inspira Enterprise, which has its North America headquarters in Dallas, is expecting to see major growth in its business this year with Saviynt, which is the solution provider’s primary vendor partner for identity governance and administration, according to Ahluwalia. That’s expected to include strong demand from small and medium-sized businesses, which at this point often face similar cyber threats to larger businesses but have fewer resources to defend against the threats, he noted.

The platform is particularly differentiated by its ability to secure third-party identities, Nayyar said.

“Today, the entities outside of their core workforce are not managed, and that is where we see so many cybersecurity holes in the system,” he said. “With Saviynt, once we start doing access management and governance across the entire IT landscape, it is a huge security and compliance benefit to our customers, and enables their digitization as well. So it’s very huge for customers.”

Details on what percentage of Saviynt’s overall revenue is currently generated through channel partners were not immediately available. The company, which has 850 employees, said that revenue between 2021 and 2022 grew by 100 percent compared to its revenue for 2020, according to Nayyar.

Nayyar’s prior stint as CEO of Saviynt occurred from 2009 to 2018, according to his LinkedIn. During much of that time, Nayyar was simultaneously serving as CEO of another cybersecurity vendor that he’d founded, Securonix.

Nayyar remained as CEO of Securonix after stepping down as chief executive of Saviynt in 2018. He remained involved with Saviynt from that point on as its executive chairman.

In December, Nayyar stepped down as CEO of Securonix, but he continues to serve as executive chairman of the company, which had raised a $1 billion round of funding in February 2022. He was succeeded as Securonix CEO by former Ivanti executive Nayaki Nayyar.