Ping Identity was bought by private equity twice in six years. In between, it went public. The Denver company sold the plumbing behind a simple promise: sign in once and get into everything. Big companies had piled up hundreds of apps, in their own data centers and in the cloud, each with its own password. Ping checked who you were and passed that trust along. When it filed in 2019, the old office firewall mattered less every year, and identity was becoming the new front door.

Passwords Without Borders

Andre Durand and Bryan Field-Elliot founded Ping Identity in 2002. Their goal was to replace older controls such as VPNs and firewalls with security built around the person logging in. Ping co-wrote open standards that let one system vouch for a user to another. It added a cloud service in 2012, multi-factor sign-in in 2014, and tools that judged risk from device and behavior. In June 2016 Vista Equity Partners bought a majority stake for $600 million.

From Fifteen to Twenty-Eight Fifty

Ping priced its IPO at $15 a share on September 19, 2019, and listed on the NYSE as PING. Goldman Sachs led the deal. Vista kept control after the offering. In August 2022 Thoma Bravo agreed to buy Ping for $28.50 a share in cash, about $2.8 billion. The deal closed on October 18, 2022, and Ping left the market. Thoma Bravo had also bought rival ForgeRock, and in August 2023 it combined the two companies under the Ping Identity name.

Cover: Untitled (Portrait of Masked Person), Rufus Anson. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a masked portrait (who are you, really).