Identity and access management company Okta acquires security company Spera.
Expected to close during the first fiscal quarter beginning in early February, the Spera acquisition will build on Okta’s existing identity threat detection and response (ITDR) capabilities, Okta says, while equipping customers with technology to “ raise their identity security, attitude management and recognition, identify and remediate risks”.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Calcalist References that Okta is paying about $100 million to $130 million for Spera, depending on milestones.
“As a leading identity partner, we remain committed to equipping our customers with the tools and knowledge they need in an increasingly demanding environment, and we are excited about how Spera Security can enhance our work at ITDR to deliver more secure results for our clients.” post published this morning on Okta’s blog reads.
Spera — which my colleague Frederic has covered before — was co-founded several years ago by entrepreneurs Dor Fledel and Ariel Kadyshevitch. Based in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, the platform provides tools to identify silos in software-as-a-service and infrastructure applications, helping to discover vulnerabilities in user populations and prioritize security issues based on regulations, attack vectors and industry best practices .
A service like Spera also serves a purpose beyond security, as Frederic noted in his coverage — helping companies reduce license costs by allowing them to find dormant accounts that can be disabled.
Spera, which has about 25 employees, had raised $10 million before the Okta acquisition. Investors include YL Ventures and angel investors from tech giants such as Google, Palo Alto Networks, Akamai and Zendesk.
Okta sees Spera as enabling its customers to better assess the security posture of their identity infrastructure, as well as their applications and services — and attracting new customers to the Okta platform. The company quotes research from Gartner suggests that by 2026, 90% of organizations will use some kind of integrated ITDR strategy — up from 5% to 20% today.
“With Spera Security, we will equip our customers with richer knowledge and technology to improve their identity security posture management and quickly identify, detect and remediate risks,” the blog post continues. “They can use Spera Security’s tangible propositions, such as SSO authentication [single sign-on] or MFA [multifactor authentication] exclusions of privileged and service accounts to improve their security posture and remediate any potential threat actors before they become critical.”
Okta’s purchase of Spera comes on the heels of the former’s acquisition of a16z-backed Uno password manager — and a rosy financial quarter for Okta. The $6 billion company Rhythm Wall Street’s fourth-quarter expectations suggest the publicly traded company is on the right track — at least in the eyes of shareholders.
