Under New Ownership, DigiCert Expands into Verified Mark Certificates
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Under New Ownership, DigiCert Expands into Verified Mark Certificates
Three years after Thoma Bravo acquired a majority holding in DigiCert, the Utah-based digital certificate firm has announced its acquisition by Clearlake Capital Group and TA Associates. TA already had a minority holding in the firm and has been investing in DigiCert for seven years.
When the plan was first announced in July 2019, Thoma Bravo said, "As a part of the transaction, Clearlake and TA will become equal partners in DigiCert. The company will continue to be led by CEO John Merrill and the current management team, who are investing alongside Clearlake and TA in the transaction."
The financial terms of the deal have not been released, but Jason Werlin, a managing director at TA Associates, commented, "We look forward to continuing to work closely with the management team to invest in and support DigiCert's innovation and growth efforts," adding, ""DigiCert has a unique opportunity to capitalize on new growth initiatives that we believe will help them better serve their customers and their industry."
Two separate and current growth opportunities for DigiCert come with the burgeoning IoT market, and companies' increasing desire to prevent their brands being abused in email phishing scams.
For IoT, DigiCert offers a PKI platform solution that verifies individual devices and encrypts their communication. "The company operates PKI for enterprise authentication and many IoT device industry consortia and manufacturers, and has issued billions of device certificates to-date," says the firm.
The email opportunity comes with the development of its own Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) for domains that send email at scale, and its upcoming pilots of the BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) standard that require validated logos. The purpose of BIMI is to allow sending companies to have their logo appear with messages in email inboxes, but without the danger of them being spoofed. The VMC is the certificate that verifies the authenticity of the logo. BIMI is intended to work alongside DMARC [(Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance)].
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