ForgeRock debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today under the ticker symbol “FORG.” Following its initial public offering (IPO), the company aims to gain a bigger share of the $71 billion digital identity market, benefitting from the boom in cybersecurity spending and digital transformation.

“This is a really exciting market,” ForgeRock CEO Fran Rosch said. “ForgeRock is really uniquely positioned to be a really big winner, given the uniqueness of our technology to really help our customers solve identity challenges at a high scale, and with fantastic performance.”

The California-based digital identity management provider initially priced 11 million shares of its Class A common stock at $25 per share, higher than the expected range of $21 to $24 per share. The IPO raised $275 million giving the company a valuation close to $2 billion.

ForgeRock will also offer an additional 1.65 million shares to its underwriters over the next 30 days. 

Prior to IPO, ForgeRock raised a total of $233.7 million over five funding rounds, including $93.5 million from a Series E round last year, according to Crunchbase.

Rosch cites the IPO as “the next natural step.” The company’s annual recurring revenue reached $155 million, with a 30% year-over-year growth rate for the second fiscal quarter of 2021, he said. In addition, it serves 1,300 enterprise customers globally, including GEICO, BMW, and Toyota, and manages ​​3 billion identities. 

Going public “will give us the opportunity to invest more in our products and technology, or go to market,” he added.

“I really believe that identity is a lot about decision making,” Rosch said. And he added artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms can help users to “quickly recognize a legitimate user and give them frictionless access while blocking bad guys.”

Because of that, ForgeRock plans to continue investing in innovations for AI and the automation functionality around its cloud service. 

The vendor currently has 765 employees globally, and Rosch said it plans to increase the headcount — especially bringing in more engineers with a background in data science, AI, and cloud technologies.

It will also look to add functionality through mergers and acquisitions with the money raised by IPO, he said. Currently, all the technology within the ForgeRock platform is natively built by its engineering team. “I think that there are areas that we would look to acquire in the months and years ahead,” Rosch said.

These will help ForgeRock compete with big players that offer a broad array of IT solutions such as Microsoft, Rosch said.

ForgeRock differentiates itself  from legacy providers, point solutions, and “homegrown” vendors like IBM, Oracle, and Okta, by offering a single platform that consolidates services for consumers, workforce, IoT devices, and access governance, he said. This can reduce operational costs and improve security.

ForgeRock’s digital identity solution adheres to a zero-trust security model. Rosch explained that the platform can help collect signals of user or device behavior throughout the entire identity journey, and then develop a real-time risk score. If the score goes above a certain level, the platform will alert customers of abnormal behaviors and offer options to step up the level of authentications.

Rosch added that “by having a more secure identity solution, we can significantly reduce the risk of data breaches and ransomware.”