1H2019 Identity Management Funding Analysis

on July 23, 2019

As the first half of 2019 has been and gone, I’ve taken a quick look at the funding rounds that have taken place so far this year, within the identity and access management space and attempted some coarse grained analysis. The focus is global and the sector definition is quite broad and based on the categories Crunchbase use.

Key Facts January to June 2017 / 2018 / 2019

Funding increased 261% year on year for the first half of 2019, compared to the same period in 2018. There were some pretty large, latter stage investments, which looks like that has skewed the number some what.

The number of organisations actually receiving funding, dropped, as did the % of organisations receiving seed funding. This is pretty typical as the market matures and stabilises in some sub categories.

1H2019

~$604million overall funding
Seed funding accounted for 20%
Median announcement date March 27th
35 companies funded

1H2018

~$231million overall funding
Seed funding accounted for 45.3%
Median announcement date March 30^th
53 companies funded

1H2017

~$237million overall funding
Seed funding accounted for 32.1%
Median announcement date April 7^th
56 companies funded

1H2019 Company Analysis

A coarse grained analysis of the 2019 numbers, shows a pretty typical geographic spread – with North America, as ever the major centre, not just for funded companies, but the funding entities too.

The types of companies funded, is also interesting. The categories are based on what Crunchbase curates, and maps against company descriptions, so there might be some overlap or ambiguity when performing detailed analysis on that.

It’s certainly interesting to see a range covering B2C fraud, payments and analytics – typically as the return on investment on such products is very tangible.

The stage of funding, provides a broad and distributed range. Seed is the clear leader, but the long tail is indicating a maturity of market, with many investors expecting strong returns.