LogMeIn Acquires Meldium

LogMeIn has announced that it has acquired the San Francisco-based single sign-on (SSO) startup Meldium to add SSO capability to its portfolio.

Meldium offers not only SSO, but also password and identity management for cloud apps that employees often introduce to an organization without going through IT departments first. These apps can introduce security risks, as they have their own infrastructures in addition to the company’s own resources. A breach in one of these services can cause problems for all the other customers, especially if they handle sensitive data Meldium attempts to make using these applications safer.

“Cloud apps and the bring-your-own-app trend – BYOA – have forced IT professionals to rethink how they manage identities, employee access, and data security. SSO is rapidly emerging as an effective means of addressing these security and identity management challenges, and Meldium has created what we believe is one of the most elegant, intuitive SSO solutions on the market today," said Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeIn. Simon said that he thought the acquisition would solve some of these challenges, as well as updates to the company’s AppGuru app management system, which the company introduced in August.

Meldium supports a number of popular cloud applications, including Basecamp, GitHub and Google Apps.

The company, which was funded by Y Combinator, will continue to operate as normal for its existing clients, while the existing Meldium team will join LogMeIn. LogMeIn acquired the company for $15 million, an impressive amount for a company with fewer than ten employees. Meldium currently has between 200 and 300 customers. Meldium’s employees will stay based in San Francisco. (LogMeIn is based in Boston.)

"While building Meldium, we have seen from thousands of early-adopters how cloud apps are transforming business and IT management. In LogMeIn, we have found a team that shares our vision of a cloud-centric workplace and our belief in creating simple and elegant tools for small-and-medium businesses," said Meldium co-founder  Boris Jabes, "We're very excited to join the LogMeIn team at a time where, together with its customers and wealth of experience, we have an amazing opportunity to help businesses embrace the cloud."

Other Y combinator alumni include Reddit, AirBNB and Dropbox.