Ping Identity Corporation is an American intelligent identity and access management (IAM) company that develops federated identity management, secure access, authentication technology, and continuous identity assurance for enterprise organizations.
Founded in 2002 by Andre Durand and Bryan Field-Elliot, the company's platform covers workforce, customer, partner, edge computing, and AI use cases.
After Thoma Bravo acquired Ping Identity in 2022 and ForgeRock in 2023, ForgeRock was integrated into Ping Identity. Ping Identity is headquartered in Denver, Colorado and operates globally, with offices in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region .
History
Founding through 2014 Ping Identity Corporation was founded in 2002 by Andre Durand and Bryan Field-Elliot, in Denver, Colorado. The company develops intelligent identity and access management (IAM) platforms, specializing in identity federation management, self-hosted identity access management, and single sign-on (SSO) solutions for workforce, customer, and partner, and AI-related use cases. Its secure-access and authentication technologies are used as an alternative to passwords, positioning the company alongside other organizations working to establish password-replacement standards. In the IAM sector, Ping Identity competes against vendors that include Microsoft, Okta, CyberArk, IBM, SailPoint, and Cisco.
Ping Identity raised a Series A funding round on April 16, 2004. This was followed by a $21 million round in 2011, a $44 million round in 2013, and a $35 million investment led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 2014.
2014-2020 In 2014, Ping Identity acquired Accells Technologies and gained access to several mobile authentication patents.
Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm based in Austin, Texas, acquired majority ownership of Ping Identity in a leveraged buyout for $600 million on June 1, 2016. At the time of the sale, Ping Identity had already taken $125 million in funding. Shortly after the buyout, Ping Identity acquired UnboundID, and expanded its customer identity and directory capabilities. In 2018, the company acquired Elastic Beam, an API security firm, adding API security technology to its platform.
In September 2019, Vista Equity Partners took the company public, in what was the first initial public offering (IPO) for one of the firm's portfolio companies. Goldman Sachs led Ping Identity's IPO, and the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol PING.
Ping Identity Holding Corp was initially listed on the New York Stock Exchange with 12,500,000 shares of common stock at $15.00 per share. The value of the stock rose $5 in its first day and jumped to a 30% increase in the market debut. This was the first organization that Vista Holdings took public. Vista retained 80 percent ownership of the company.
2021-present In 2021, Ping Identity released its PingOne Cloud Platform and Dynamic Authorization offering.
In August 2022, Thoma Bravo agreed to buy Ping Identity in an all-cash transaction valued at around $2.8 billion. The acquisition closed on October 18, 2022. Upon its completion, Ping Identity returned to private ownership with its stock no longer listed on the New York Stock Exchange. On August 23, 2023, Ping Identity and ForgeRock were combined following Thoma Bravo's acquisition of ForgeRock. The combination allowed Ping Identity to present a broader identity platform.
By 2026, Ping Identity managed over eight billion accounts. The acquisition of Procyon in 2025 expanded Ping Identity's privileged-access offerings. In 2026 the company completed its acquisition of Keyless, and expanded its biometric authentication services with the integration of Keyless’s Zero Knowledge Biometrics into the Ping Identity platform. The acquisition also expanded Ping’s authentication options for frontline workers and shared terminal environments.
Products Ping Identity is a software company that specializes in identity management solutions, providing a suite of products including PingID for multifactor authentication, PingFederate for single sign-on capabilities, PingOne for cloud identity, PingAccess for access management, PingDirectory for identity storage, PingAuthorize for policy-based access control, and PingIntelligence for AI-powered cyber threat detection. Together with solutions from Okta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google, these constitute the "identity meta system" as defined in "Design Rationale behind the Identity Metasystem Architecture," which refers to an interoperable architecture for digital identity.
In 2026, the company expanded its products and services to address the ongoing identity assurance and security needs related to artificial intelligence. The included the announcement of Universal Services, which Ping Identity described as supporting continuous identity assurance to shift identity security from single checks to ongoing verification.
Standards Ping Identity participates in identity standards and interoperability efforts including the FIDO Alliance and the OpenID Foundation. Its products support open standards and protocols such as SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and Financial-grade API (FAPI).
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