Keyfactor to Merge with PrimeKey

Ohio PKI-as-a-Service pioneer Keyfactor and Swedish PKI solutions provider PrimeKey have announced their intention to merge.

Plans for the companies to come together under the Keyfactor brand “while committing to increased investments across all product lines” were shared on April 15. 

PrimeKey was established 19 years ago by the company’s CTO, Tomas Gustavsson, who developed an interest in computer code as a child. Today the company works with partners and customers across six continents from its headquarters in Solna, Stockholm. 

Describing how the merger would benefit customers, PrimeKey CEO Magnus Svenningson said: “Our combined solutions now give customers unparalleled deployment choices including PKI-as-a-Service, SaaS PKI (Azure, AWS, GCP), software appliance or FIPS 140–certified hardware.

“These flexible deployment options give our customers the control to operate a single pane of glass across all their machine identities in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

Open source software developed by PrimeKey will not be closed following the deal, which is expected to be finalized after the Swedish government approves the merger from a national security perspective.

Svenningson said: “Our EJBCA, SignServer and Bouncy Castle solutions are widely adopted by the developer community to integrate security in DevSecOps workflows and will remain open source as we continue to bring cutting-edge innovations to our enterprise customers.”

Under the terms of the merger, Svenningson will assume the roles of executive vice president (EVP) of business development and chief strategy officer (CSO) while Keyfactor’s Jordan Rackie will remain at the helm as CEO.

“The merger with PrimeKey amplifies the performance of the combined businesses across product offerings, distribution channels, expertise for our customers and large open source communities,” said Rackie. 

The CEO attributed Keyfactor’s 50% year-over-year growth to industry’s need to prevent loss of brand reputation, business outages, and fines by proactively securing the identity of every machine before disaster strikes. 

Rackie said: “Now more than ever, enterprises must operate in a zero-trust world, and machine identity management can no longer be ignored as part of an identity and access management (IAM) strategy.” 

The transaction is expected to close within the next 90 days.