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Press Release
$125M Growth Round Fuels Keyfactor and PrimeKey Merger to Bring Machine Identity Management to the Mainstream

First-Ever Merger Between Certificate Automation and Certificate Authority Providers Set to Impact IAM Strategy for Enterprises

CLEVELAND and STOCKHOLM – April 15, 2021Keyfactor® and PrimeKey® today announced their intent to merge under the Keyfactor brand while committing to increased investments across all product lines.

Keyfactor is the pioneer of PKI as-a-Service, and the recognized leader in certificate lifecycle automation and crypto-agility solutions. PrimeKey’s EJBCA® software offers the most powerful and flexible certificate authority (CA) supporting DevOps, IoT, manufacturing and enterprise use cases.

The merger forms an industry-first machine identity management platform, combining Keyfactor’s certificate lifecycle automation with PrimeKey’s EJBCA. The new platform will provide end-to-end machine identity management – with flexible and highly scalable certificate issuance and automated deployment of machine identities across complex enterprise and emerging IoT and OT use cases.

“Now more than ever, enterprises must operate in a zero trust world, and machine identity management can no longer be ignored as part of an identity and access management (IAM) strategy,” explained Jordan Rackie, CEO at Keyfactor. “Keyfactor’s 50% year-over-year growth is a testament to the industry’s imperative to secure every machine identity before it leads to loss of brand reputation, business outages or fines. The merger with PrimeKey amplifies the performance of the combined businesses across product offerings, distribution channels, expertise for our customers and large open source communities.”

Machine identity management was introduced by Gartner in its Hype Cycle for Identity and Access Management Technologies, 2020 report and recognized as a “high” benefit in IAM. Even though machine identities, such as keys, certificates and secrets continue to outnumber human identities (e.g., usernames and passwords), they are often left out of an IAM strategy. Keyfactor customers recognize that cryptography is the critical infrastructure to ensure digital trust and help CISO’s achieve crypto-agility for their digital business.

“Our combined solutions now give customers unparalleled deployment choices including PKI as-a-Service, SaaS PKI (Azure, AWS, GCP), software appliance or FIPS 140-certified hardware,” explained Magnus Svenningson, CEO at PrimeKey. “These flexible deployment options give our customers the control to operate a single pane of glass across all their machine identities in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Our EJBCA, SignServer and Bouncy Castle solutions are widely adopted by the developer community to integrate security in DevSecOps workflows and will remain open source as we continue to bring cutting-edge innovations to our enterprise customers.”

PrimeKey’s employees will join Keyfactor, creating an unprecedented mashup of talent in the identity management space. Jordan Rackie will continue leading the organization as CEO and Magnus Svenningson will assume the role of chief strategy officer (CSO) and executive vice president (EVP) of business development. The combined company will have a global presence with offices in the U.S., EMEA and Asia-Pacific. The transaction is expected to close within the next 90 days, pending approval by the Swedish authorities.

“The market is recognizing that securing machine identities is a fundamental pillar of a modern identity governance program,” said Thomas Krane, principal at Insight Partners. “The IAM market is shifting its focus from human to machine identities, and this merger positions Keyfactor to stay on the leading edge of this evolution. Independently, Keyfactor and PrimeKey offer a forward-thinking approach to conventional IAM. Combined, the companies deliver a future-proof management solution for every machine identity.”

This $125 million growth infusion, led by Insight Partners, adds to its initial $77 million investment in Keyfactor in 2019.

For more information, please see our FAQs.

About Keyfactor

Keyfactor is the leader in cloud-first PKI-as-a-Service and crypto-agility solutions. Its Crypto-Agility Platform™ empowers security teams to seamlessly orchestrate every key and certificate across their entire enterprise. The company helps its customers apply cryptography in the right way from modern, multi-cloud enterprises to complex IoT supply chains.

With decades of cybersecurity experience, Keyfactor is trusted by more than 500 enterprises across the globe. Built on a foundation of trust and security, Keyfactor is a proud equal opportunity employer, supporter and advocate of growing a trusted, secure, diverse and inclusive workplace. For more information, visit www.keyfactor.com or follow Keyfactor on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

About PrimeKey

PrimeKey is one of the world’s leading PKI and signing solutions providers and has developed several innovative products, including EJBCA® Enterprise, SignServer Enterprise, PKI Appliance, PrimeKey SEE and Identity Authority Manager.

As a pioneer in open-source security software, PrimeKey provides global businesses and organizations the ability to implement vital security solutions, such as e-ID, e-Passports, authentication, digital signatures, unified digital identities and validation. PrimeKey products are Common Criteria and FIPS-certified, the company’s internal processes are ISO 9001, 14001 and 27001 certified and it has numerous Webtrust/ETSI and eIDAS-audited customers.

PrimeKey has offices in Stockholm, Sweden; Aachen, Germany; San Mateo, USA; and Melbourne, Australia. With a global network of technology and reselling partners, PrimeKey supports a customer roster that includes industry-leading companies and institutions across the IT, telecommunications, industry, finance and public sectors. For more information, please visit www.primekey.com or follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Media Contacts

Keyfactor
Jamie Walker

[email protected]

802.338.0817

MRB Public Relations (for Keyfactor)
Angela Tuzzo
[email protected]

732.758.1100

PrimeKey

Magnus Svenningson, CEO

[email protected]

+46739639700

Tomas Gustavsson, CTO

[email protected]

+46707421096

Akima Media (for PrimeKey)

Simon A. Löfflad

[email protected]

+49 89 1795918-0