OneLogin acquires Portadi to bring level of automation to login onboarding

On a day with a couple of huge deals being announced, we have a much more modest one. OneLogin announced it was buying Portadi, a San Jose startup that launched at the beginning of 2015, for an undisclosed sum.

In a market with better-financed competitors with billion-dollar valuations like Okta, OneLogin is working hard to improve its offering and Portadi helps bring a level of automation to the OneLogin onboarding process.

OneLogin acts as a single sign-on access point for all of your enterprise cloud applications. Most companies use a fair number of applications, so simply logging in should in theory drive a workflow to add your credentials for a given application to the OneLogin platform.

The good news is there is an industry standard called SAML to drive this, but the bad news is that not every application uses it. In fact, lots don’t and that was a big part of the reasoning behind the purchase, OneLogin CEO Thomas Pedersen told TechCrunch.

That means customers have to create a custom connector manually for each of these freelance apps and that’s a fair bit of work for administrators. What Portadi will allow OneLogin to do is create the connector on the fly when a user logs into an application that’s not part of their system.

“What Portadi had built was a clever heuristics-­based engine that seamlessly and with very high accuracy detects a user’s login activity and captures the user’s credentials in the process. I quickly realized that we had to include this as part of OneLogin,” Pedersen wrote in a company blog post announcing the acquisition.

Users get frustrated when their credentials aren’t included in the single-sign on process, and Portadi helps reduce the friction of that process by automatically adding the credentials to OneLogin, Pedersen explained.

Portadi’s founders will be joining OneLogin as part of the deal. This is its second acquisition, having purchased CafeSoft, a small web access management startup last December.

OneLogin was founded in 2010 and has raised $42.7 million. Its most recent funding round was $25 million Series C in December 2014.