Washington-based identity-as-a-service startup Auth0 raises $120M Series F led by Salesforce Ventures at a $1.92B post-money valuation, up from $1B in May 2019
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Auth0 has been on a steady fundraising ladder: a $15M Series B in 2016 when it counted 75K developer subscribers, then the $103M Series E in May 2019 that put it at $1B with 7,000 enterprise clients. This round roughly doubles that valuation in fourteen months and swaps in a strategic lead.
The lead investor is the notable part: Salesforce Ventures has been systematically buying positions around its ecosystem — Vlocity on Salesforce's CRM platform, data-protection firm BigID, and later Salesforce-ecosystem backup vendor OwnBackup all raised with it leading. Identity is now joining that portfolio.
First-order effects
- Auth0 gains $120M of growth capital at a $1.92B post-money valuation, with Salesforce Ventures now holding a strategic stake in the authentication layer its own customer base logs in through.
Second-order effects
- Salesforce Ventures' repeated lead role across Vlocity, BigID, OwnBackup and now Auth0 signals corporate capital crowding into enterprise SaaS rounds, raising the bar for purely financial investors chasing the same deals.
Third-order effects
- If strategic investors keep setting the price for infrastructure layers — identity, data protection, backup — valuations in enterprise software increasingly reflect acquirer interest rather than standalone financials.
The trend: Corporate venture arms are consolidating ownership of the enterprise SaaS stack by leading the mega-rounds for each infrastructure layer.