SecureAuth appoints new CEO following Cloudentity acquisition

Major changes are afoot at SecureAuth, which has appointed Joseph Dhanapal as Chief Executive Officer on the heel of acquiring customer identity and access management (CIAM) provider Cloudentity.

Dhanapal also joins SecureAuth’s board of directors. He brings experience as VP of PingOne Advanced Services at Ping Identity, leading the IAM cloud solution’s go to market and operations strategies.

“In a digital first world, with increasing attacks on digital IDs, enterprises are looking for advanced solutions that balance security and user experience; and SecureAuth is positioned to deliver solutions that address evolving enterprise workforce and consumer identity access management needs,” says Dhanapal in the announcement. He sees an opportunity for the company to differentiate itself “based on agility and responsiveness to customer needs.”

Outgoing CEO Paul Trulove was thanked by K1 Investment Management Managing Partner Ron Cano for leading SecureAuth to increased profitability, strategic acquisitions, and a broader global base of customers.

Cloudentity deal expands flexibility, open banking capabilities

SecureAuth and Cloudentity are being merged to expand the combined entity’s capabilities in workforce and consumer access management, authentication, and authorization.

Seattle-based Cloudentity was founded in 2011 by Nathanael Coffing, and raised $13 million in a series A funding round in 2020 that Crunchbase lists as its last.

The acquisition gives SecureAuth the ability to integrate “passwordless authentication with fine-grained authorization controls and delegated trust across multi-party ecosystems and across multi-cloud environments” for stronger security, compliance with open finance and data privacy regulations and better user experiences, according to a company blog post. It also improves access management for infrequent and surge users efficiently and cost-effectively at very large scale. Cloudentity’s platform allows SecureAuth to offer delegated B2B partner IAM with granular controls, and eases integration with standard API frameworks and Service Mesh Controllers.

The biggest impact may come from Cloudentity’s support for the security and consent requirements that go along with open banking. That includes the Financial-grade API (FAPI) 2.0, FDX, CDR, Open Banking UK and other regional standards.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

SecureAuth’s behavioral biometrics and passwordless authentication were integrated by BeyondTrust in late-2023, just as SecureAuth was updating its Arculix platform with support for Citrix and Microsoft Entra ID.

Article Topics

acquisitions  |  appointments  |  Cloudentity  |  customer identity and access management (CIAM)  |  SecureAuth