SailPoint has gone public twice, both times with Thoma Bravo as its main owner. Its software answers a plain question that big companies struggle with: who has access to what. Employees join, switch jobs and leave, and their logins pile up across hundreds of apps. SailPoint tracks those rights and flags the ones that should not exist. When the Austin company first went public in November 2017, a run of data breaches had made that question urgent.

Identity Veterans in Austin

Mark McClain founded SailPoint in Austin in 2005 with Kevin Cunnington, after both had worked in identity management software. In 2007 it released IdentityIQ, which it said created a new category called identity governance. In 2010 it combined governance with provisioning, the work of setting up and removing access. The bet was that auditors and security teams would demand proof of who could reach sensitive data. Thoma Bravo invested and owned about 60 percent going into the offering.

Public, Private, Public Again

SailPoint priced 20 million shares at $12 in November 2017 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as SAIL. It moved its products to the cloud over the next few years. In 2022 Thoma Bravo took the company private again for about $6.9 billion. In February 2025 SailPoint returned to the market, this time on Nasdaq, at $23 a share. It still trades under its old ticker, SAIL.

Cover: Sailboat, John Sell Cotman. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a sailboat (SailPoint).