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Identity management company Okta plans to go public in about nine months, says CEO Todd McKinnon.
“The plan is, next summer,” McKinnon said in an interview with Re/code’s Arik Hesseldahl and Jason Del Rey at the Code/Enterprise Series event at the Steelcase WorkLife Center in New York Tuesday night.
Okta is one of Silicon Valley’s latest unicorns, having raised $75 million earlier this month in a round that valued the company at $1.2 billion. VC firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital have invested a combined $230 million in Okta, which helps manage companies’ login information for all the new cloud-based applications businesses are adopting today.
McKinnon, a former engineering exec at Salesforce.com, started the company in 2009 and was initially criticized for what some saw as a very niche business.
But McKinnon argues that providing a single, cloud-based sign-on for big companies is a “foundational” opportunity.
Today, Okta has more than 2,700 companies as customers including Chiquita Brands, LinkedIn, MGM Resorts and software giant SAP, and its platform connects to thousands of applications and services — Amazon, Box, Dropbox, Oracle, DocuSign and Workday are just a few.
Okta is also helping companies manage their mobile devices. It expanded into that business last year, competing against the likes of AirWatch, Good Technology and even IBM.
Another related business is information. Since Okta connects to thousands of different cloud apps, it also has a lot of visibility into which of those apps are succeeding in the marketplace. Last month, it released a report showing that, among Okta users, Microsoft’s Office 365 is the most widely used enterprise cloud application in the world. Google took issue with the finding, saying it considers Google Apps and Dropbox the most widely used.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
