Sagi Rodin started coding at 14 and kept rebuilding the same user-management plumbing at every job. So he built it once, properly, and turned it into Frontegg - now backed by roughly $70 million.
Most software careers are a loop. You build a login screen, then a way to invite teammates, then roles and permissions, then an admin dashboard so someone can turn features on and off. You ship it. You move to the next project. And you build the whole thing again. Sagi Rodin ran that loop enough times to get sick of it, and instead of accepting it as the tax of the job, he decided to end it for good.
Rodin is the CEO and co-founder of Frontegg, a company that sells the least glamorous thing in software: the plumbing behind the front door. Authentication. Authorization. User management. The admin portal. The parts a customer never praises and always notices when they break. It is not a product that gets standing ovations at a demo day. It is a product that quietly saves engineering teams months of work, and that turned out to be worth building a company around.
His path to it started early and far away.
Rodin was born in St. Petersburg and moved to Israel at age five. His parents were engineers - one trained in biochemistry, one in turbines - who took humble jobs while they found their footing in a new country. That is a specific kind of childhood to grow up in: highly capable people starting over from zero, doing unglamorous work without complaint. It is hard not to see the echo in what he chose to build decades later.
He started programming around 14, and by 15 he was building websites with ASP 3.0. He served in the Israeli army as a database instructor - teaching, at an age when most people are still learning, the unfashionable discipline of how data should be stored and retrieved. Then came a computer software engineering degree from the Technion, Israel's demanding engineering institute.
Before Frontegg, Rodin worked at Check Point Software Technologies, the Israeli cybersecurity giant, where he rose to Director of Security on Cloud. Inside a company that size, he kept running into the same wall from his own past: every new application needed its own customer identity and access management system, and every team built it from scratch.
So he did something more interesting than complain. He pitched senior management on solving it once, centrally, and asked for a small team to try. One of the people he pulled in was an engineer named Aviad Mizrachi. The first version was built in a single-day hackathon.
That is the tell. Most hackathon projects die the same week they are demoed. This one spread to more than 50 internal services because it solved a real, repeated, expensive problem. When a throwaway prototype refuses to be thrown away, it is trying to tell you something. Rodin listened.
He had also been quietly preparing. He has described Check Point as “a stop in the middle for launching something on my own,” and when an earlier startup he worked at was acquired, he treated it as training. His summary is blunt: “you need to be prepared” to start a company.
In 2019, Rodin and Mizrachi left to found Frontegg and commercialize the idea. The pitch was simple to state and hard to execute: give any B2B SaaS company the core components of a modern application - login, roles, permissions, self-serve onboarding, an admin portal - through a few lines of code, at a quality normally reserved for the biggest engineering teams.
The reference point Rodin reaches for is the feeling you get signing up for Slack, Notion, or Figma. It is smooth, it is polished, it just works. That smoothness is not free; it costs months of engineering that most teams cannot spare. Frontegg's bet is that smaller companies will happily rent that feeling rather than build it.
Rodin is insistent that this is not just about the login box. “User management now includes aspects of every stage of the user journey, from signing up all the way to converting to a paid plan,” he has said. In his framing, identity is not a feature you bolt on. It is the spine of how a product grows.
The money followed. A $25 million Series A in late 2021, a $40 million Series B in 2022, and a customer list that grew to include enterprises like Siemens alongside startups that could never have staffed this themselves. The company scaled past 60 employees split across Israel and California - Rodin himself now sits in the San Francisco Bay Area, close to the American market Frontegg spent 2022 pushing into.
Ask Rodin how he thinks about building a company and he keeps returning to hiring. “You need to hire the right people from the get-go,” he says. The logic underneath it is almost anti-heroic: capable people do not need managing, and a founder who is not busy managing gets to spend time on the strategic work that actually moves the business.
He studies other operators for exactly this - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk - though not for the visionary theatrics. He reads them for how they staff and how they sustain growth. He mixes in marketing thinkers like Neil Patel, Seth Godin, and Adam Grant. It is a reading list built by someone who treats running a company as a craft to be practiced, not a talent to be assumed.
The tech enthusiasm is not a phase he grew out of. People who have talked to him note that he still discusses code with the energy of the 15-year-old who discovered ASP. Away from Frontegg, he lists the ordinary, grounding things - music, movies, sports, cooking - and he runs a company spread across two continents while raising three children. There is no secret balance trick in that. There is just someone who genuinely likes the work, including the parts most people find dull.
That last bit is the through-line. Rodin built a career and a company on the corner of software nobody brags about. His talk at the Authenticate 2023 conference was titled “Minimum Viable Authentication: The Art of Balancing UX and Security” - which is a very Rodin thing to care about. Not the flashiest security, not the loosest experience, but the exact, unglamorous point where the two meet without annoying anyone.
Users do not stay for your login screen. But they will leave over a bad one. Rodin found a whole company hiding inside that uncomfortable little fact - and decided that building the boring part beautifully was worth doing once, so no one would have to do it badly again.