SailPoint

Mark McClain and Kevin Cunningham, who had previously built Waveset (bought by Sun), founded SailPoint in Austin in 2005. The niche is IGA, identity governance and administration, which sits beside ordinary IAM rather than replacing it: someone else handles the login, SailPoint tracks who ought to have which entitlements and makes managers certify it every quarter.

IdentityIQ was the flagship, later joined by the cloud service IdentityNow. The ownership history is a private-equity loop: Thoma Bravo bought it in 2014, took it public in 2017, bought it back for $6.9 billion in 2022 and listed it again in 2025. Auditors and SOX have sold more licences than any demo.