JanRain reins in $3 million for OpenID

Early round of funds likely to be used for expansion of company’s own OpenID platform

JanRain, provider of OpenID business solutions, has just raised $3 million in a Series A round of financing, according to a release by peHUB posted yesterday afternoon. DFJ Frontier led the early stage venture capital funding, with a regulatory filing citing one-third of the total raised funds as equity investments.

OpenID is a decentralized standard protocol that allows users to authenticate their identity across multiple services with the same login name and password. Taking the form of URLs, an OpenID like “ronny.openid.com” might be the sign-in info I use across all my favorite Web sites.

According to JanRain’s own Web site, there are already over 500 million OpenID-enabled users across more than 25,000 Web sites, including AOL, MySpace, Yahoo, and Google Blogger.

Presenting those enticing numbers, JanRain offers its clients three key product solutions. RPX allows companies to enable OpenIDs on their own Web sites, empowering them to accept and verify users’ third-party accounts on Google,Yahoo, and many others. OPX allows businesses to brand and issue their own OpenIDs to customers, employees, and/or members. Finally, myOpenID is JanRain’s independent provider of OpenIDs for users looking for secure control of their digital identity.

Though the Portland-OR company is still in its early stages, JanRain has been pushing OpenID since 2005. It just happily announced a few days ago the integration of its RPX protocol into the Web site of footwear company DC Shoes.

JanRain’s new funds will likely be put to use immediately to expand the company’s name and to sign up new clients for its products.

Also, as part of this latest fundraiser, DFJ Frontier managing director David Cremin will be joining JanRain’s board of directors.