Intelligent identity platform Ping Identity is making plans to go public. The company’s registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which paves the way for an initial public offering, was made available late last week.
The number of shares to be offered and the initial price range have not yet been disclosed, but TechCrunch reports that the company could secure a valuation between $2 billion and $3 billion. Ping Identity will list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “PING.”
Vista Equity Partners, which acquired Ping Identity in 2016 for $600 million, will retain partial ownership of the company post-IPO. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, RBC Capital Markets, and Citigroup are the IPO’s lead underwriters.
Founded in 2003, Ping Identity demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2012. The company’s solutions enable customers and employees to securely and seamlessly access cloud, mobile, SaaS, and on-premises applications and APIs from any location. Ping Identity leverages single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to provide one-click, real-time access and security, helping organizations move toward a “Zero Trust” identity-defined security regime. Named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Access Management in 2019, the company introduced its new private cloud identity solution for the enterprise, PingCloud Private Tenant, earlier this month.
In its prospectus, Ping Identity notes that its platform secures more than two billion identities around the world as of June of this year. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 are Ping Identity customers, as are 12 of the biggest banks and five out of the seven largest retailers in the U.S. The company also highlighted its use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as its role in helping develop open identity standards.
Financially speaking, the company is seeking a return to the profitability it enjoyed in 2017. Ping Identity reported year-over-year revenue growth of 17% the following year, and announced period-over-period revenue growth of 14% for the first six months of this year.
This spring, the company was named Best Identity Management Solution at the 2019 SC Awards, and twice-honored by DeveloperWeek with its Devies and Info Security Global Excellence awards. Ping has forged partnerships this year with companies like fellow Finovate alum TIBCO to leverage AI to help defend APIs against cyberthreats, and with Citrix Analytics to enable contextual access for its Citrix Workspace.
Ping’s competitors in the SSO and MFA solution provider space include heavyweights like IBM and Oracle, as well as Microsoft. And while comparing its technology favorably to the “complex, costly and increasingly fragile” systems of its rivals, Ping Identity has partnered with Microsoft and noted the benefits of this relationship in its prospectus.
“(We) partner with Microsoft to provide SSO, security control and adaptive MFA where non-Microsoft environments require integration or independence is preferred,” the prospectus reads. “Microsoft’s integration and interoperability with our solutions benefits enterprises while providing optionality and choice.”
Ping Identity was founded by Andre Durand, who serves as the company’s CEO. The company is headquartered in Denver, Colorado.