CrowdStrike Invests in Microsoft AD Competitor JumpCloud

LOUISVILLE, Colo. – Oct. 19, 2021 – JumpCloud today announced it has raised a total of $225 million for its Series F round to accelerate small and midsize enterprise adoption of its modern directory platform. Investors in this round share a belief that organizations must move faster to solve growing challenges faced by IT, specifically serious limitations and risks that come from legacy Microsoft directories and trying to solve those limitations with multiple point solutions.

The Series F round led by Sapphire Ventures includes additional strategic investment from Atlassian Ventures, CrowdStrike Falcon Fund, NTT Docomo Ventures, Inc., STEADFAST Capital Ventures, Waterman Ventures, and OurCrowd. Series F included participation from Owl Rock, Whale Rock Capital, Sands Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst. Existing investors General Atlantic, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, and H.I.G. Growth Partners participated in the financing as well. The additional $66 million funding announced today closes the company’s Series F at $225 million and brings total capital raised by JumpCloud to over $400 million and the company’s valuation to $2.625 billion.

“Atlassian and CrowdStrike share our vision for delivering IT teams a modern directory platform that simplifies how they secure their organizations and Make Work Happen®,” said Rajat Bhargava, CEO, JumpCloud. “Across each of our customer bases, IT teams are looking for an alternative to Microsoft for managing and securing infrastructure. With this new investment, we can do deep integration work with both Atlassian and CrowdStrike to make JumpCloud’s open, cloud directory the obvious choice for all our customers.”

IT Needs Better Solutions, Now

The need for a modern cloud directory has emerged from several recent mega trends:

· The sudden shift to remote work, which made on-premises infrastructure, like Active Directory, ineffective

· The emergence of Mac, Linux, and mobile devices in the workplace, which required IT to find new ways to secure and manage devices that were not Windows-based

· The explosion of cloud infrastructure — both as core business applications and for internal development teams

These changes fundamentally shift how work gets done, and have outpaced IT’s ability to respond with a secure, effective infrastructure. Additionally, this diversification of what, how, and where people work has opened many new opportunities for cybercriminals. For IT teams at small and midsize enterprises (SMEs), finding the resources to keep up with the endless flow of new user and security demands is overwhelming.

JumpCloud delivers a better approach. Rather than relying on Microsoft’s legacy directory and multiple add-on point solutions, JumpCloud’s Directory Platform delivers a single pane of glass for IT to securely manage all users, devices, and IT resources. This reduces organizational risk, infrastructure costs, and makes life easier for IT — especially teams at SMEs that do not have the budgets and teams akin to large enterprises.

“Atlassian and JumpCloud share a vision that IT teams can operate in a more modern, open way,” said Chris Hecht, Head of Corporate Development, Atlassian. “We’re thrilled to support their efforts to accelerate the adoption of the modern directory platform, and excited to work together on deep integrations across our products.”

“The threat landscape becomes increasingly more complex by the day. To reduce the risk of cyberattacks, small and midsize organizations must accelerate adoption of enterprise-grade security and IT solutions,” said Michael Sentonas, Chief Technology Officer, CrowdStrike. “To do this, organizations of all sizes must have access to scalable, easy-to-deploy, and cost-effective solutions. JumpCloud’s cloud directory platform protects against the weaknesses found in similar legacy products that are being actively exploited by threat actors, and is designed to meet the needs of today’s SMEs. We are excited to support JumpCloud’s efforts and look forward to exploring ways to deliver meaningful integrations for the market.”

Additional Investor and Customer Quotes

NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. (NDV) is the corporate venture arm of the NTT Group, and NTT is one of the world's leading telecommunications companies.

“I am excited to invest in and join the JumpCloud journey to provide a better way for companies, mainly IT teams in small- to medium-sized enterprises, to manage remote work environments more securely and efficiently,” said Yuko Sasahara Watanabe, President and CEO, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. “In late September 2021, NTT Group announced our plans to transform operational and management styles for sustainability towards making a more positive impact on society. As part of this initiative, NTT employees will be able to work remotely. This challenge is not easy, but together with JumpCloud, we can provide more flexibility in a distributed remote work environment. We look forward to supporting JumpCloud in the Japanese market. NDV would like to expand various security options to Japanese enterprise customers regardless of the size of the company and working with JumpCloud is a way to do that.”

“What struck us as unique in JumpCloud is their ability to dramatically simplify security for companies of all sizes and reduce the friction for employees, making remote work seamless and secure,” said Ludwig Schulze, Managing Partner, Waterman Ventures, an Alumni Ventures fund. “This is an investment that many of our thousands of individual investors can benefit from immediately in their organizations.”

“We seek out game-changing technology companies, and after our own IT team started using JumpCloud it was an easy choice to invest: JumpCloud is the best platform capable of centralizing and securing IT,” said Jon Medved, founder and CEO, OurCrowd, Israel’s most active VC. “JumpCloud is a superior alternative to anachronistic and ill-fitted legacy IT approaches, and we're excited to support its expansion as more organizations rely on it to solve critical challenges of the modern workplace.”

“The rise of a globally-connected and distributed workforce (a trend accelerated by COVID-19) is motivating every company to reinvent their security stack and redefine boundaries as they are tasked with securing their users wherever they are and across all use cases and environments,” said Karan Mehandru, Managing Director, STEADFAST Capital Ventures. “JumpCloud is perfectly positioned to capitalize on these trends and has built a dominant position by providing a unified platform that empowers IT professionals to adapt to our changing world, while giving users a delightful and intuitive experience that is the hallmark of the best product-led SaaS companies. We have a high degree of confidence in JumpCloud’s team, product, market opportunity, and timing, and are proud to partner with Rajat and the JumpCloud team as they build an enduring company that defines how companies born in the cloud build, manage, and scale their identity and security posture.”

“We came from having an Active Directory server for domain auth, a Kerberos server for Linux auth, and an LDAP server for authentication to other non-AD/Kerberos services,” said Ken Hughes, staff devops engineer, Baxter Planning. “JumpCloud literally let us consolidate all of our authentication services and added user authentication and device management for our Mac staff as well. Users now have a single credential for 99% of all corporate resources.”

About JumpCloud

The JumpCloud Directory Platform helps IT teams Make Work Happen® by centralizing management of user identities and devices, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt Zero Trust security models. JumpCloud® has a global user base of more than 120,000 organizations, with more than 5,000 paying customers including Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, ClassPass, Uplight, Beyond Finance, and Foursquare. JumpCloud has raised over $400M from world-class investors including Sapphire Ventures, General Atlantic, Sands Capital, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike.