Data protector HYCU has gained a strategic investment from Okta Ventures as part of an extended B-round which brought in $53 million in June this year. This also gives it access, with Okta’s blessing, to more than 15,000 potential customers in the Okta ecosystem.
Okta is a public company, with an $8.43 billion market capitalization. It provides an identity and access management platform to help secure user authenticated access to IT resources. Okta’s services are based on the AWS cloud and include Single Sign-On, Universal Directory, Advanced Server Access (formerly ScaleFTokta ventures, API Access Management, Authentication, User Management, B2B Integration, Multi-factor Authentication, Lifecycle Management, and an Access Gateway. Okta Ventures is a $50 million fund to support companies with products allied to to these activities.
Simon Taylor, HYCU founder and CEO, said in a statement: “Connecting Okta’s powerful SSO and identity management solutions with HYCU’s Protégé platform ensures data is available and protected regardless of location.”
He told an IT Press Tour in Palo Alto that Okta has 8,000+ technology integrations with applications. Okta Ventures enables startups, like HYCU, to accelerate their go-to-market activities with access to Okta’s 15,000+ customers and with the broader Okta team’s expertise.
HYCU will be able to get access to Okta’s APIs, technologies, and engineering expertise, and increase its brand awareness with co-marketing opportunities through the Okta Integration Network.
Our understanding is that this Okta deal gives HYCU access to the Okta customer base and SaaS vendors, with potential HYCU integration with Okta users’ SaaS applications using pre-built integrations.
This is connected with the B-round Atlassian and CIsco investments in HYCU, which should give HYCU access to those companies’ customer bases as well.
In effect, HYCU is getting access to new groups of customers through Atlassian, Okta and Cisco, with benevolent recommendations from them to their customers and users. This is a new kind of go-to-market activity by HYCU, getting help from a user ecosystem supplier to sell to ecosystem members.
HYCU’s development roadmap includes cost-effective multi-cloud migration and disaster recovery, auto-detection of insecure HYCU backup targets, US government NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership) certification, and a cloud-first backup strategy for Edge sites outside datacenters.
A major HYCU announcement about the Okta deal is due in the next few weeks. HYCU will have a presence at Oktane 22, the annual Okta user conference to be held at at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from November 8–10, and the news will probably be released then.
