authentication
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Rodger Desai and the case of the vanishing password
A shared village phone helped Rodger Desai see what mobile technology could do. At Prove, he has spent years pursuing a more ordinary miracle: letting people get on with their lives online.
Joe Siegrist and the trouble with the keys
He helped build LastPass to make passwords less of a chore. Then Joe Siegrist had to answer a harder question: what makes people trust the company holding them?
Eric Woodward and the quiet work of making money move
Before advising Baselayer, Eric Woodward helped build the identity and risk systems behind Zelle. His career follows a deceptively simple question: who is really on the other end of a transaction?
The Login Screen That Kept Growing
Clerk began by making sign-in a component developers could drop into an app. Now the same identity layer reaches teams, subscriptions and agents - while its customers ask the hardest question of any login provider: will it be there when they need it?
The Cloud With an Exit Door
Appwrite began as a backend its founder could not afford to host. Seven years later, that constraint has become the pitch: take the convenient cloud today, keep the right to leave tomorrow.
Collectors Put a Price on Trust. Now Comes the Waiting List.
The company behind PSA and PCGS turned expert judgment into a business spanning grading, storage and sales. A 9.9-million-item PSA backlog shows why scaling trust takes more than software.
iProov Wants Your Face to Prove It Was There
A face can be copied. A moment is harder to steal. iProov uses light, biometrics and a watchful security team to check who is really on the other side of the screen.
The Failed Forum That Became a $65 Million Bet on Owning Your Login
FusionAuth began as a test login for a forum nobody wanted. Its second act - free to download, deployable almost anywhere, and built for developers - turned an internal tool into a profitable challenger to Auth0, Okta, and the cloud giants.
The Postgres Company That Let AI Write the Signups
It started as the open-source answer to Firebase. Then AI coding agents adopted it as their default backend, and Supabase doubled its valuation to $10.5 billion in eight months.
Rakesh Soni Built a Business Around the Moment Before ‘Welcome’
A clumsy registration form gave Rakesh Soni his opening. Thirteen years later, LoginRadius manages the quiet exchange of trust between global brands and more than a billion digital identities.
Alex Salazar Is Building the Permission Layer for AI's Hands
Before Arcade could help AI agents act, its founders had to let their first idea fail. Alex Salazar's career explains why the useful product was hiding in the permissions underneath.
The Quiet Infrastructure Behind 15 Billion Customer Connections
Every OTP, delivery alert and WhatsApp reply looks simple on a phone. CEQUENS has spent 15 years making the carrier routes, compliance rules and software behind those moments disappear.
Derek Jeter Wants to Keep Your Cards Out of the Shoebox
The Hall of Fame shortstop and the founder of LegalZoom built a company around a simple frustration: card collecting is a great hobby wrapped in a bad logistics problem. Arena Club grades, vaults, and trades the cards so collectors do not have to.
Vivek Nair
Vivek Nair is the co-founder and CEO of Multifactor (YC F25), an applied cryptography company building zero-trust authentication, authorization, and auditing for AI agents. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley at 22 as a Hertz Fellow, published landmark work on privacy in virtual reality, and served as a technical lead in cyber units at the Department of Defense and CIA before starting the company.
Sagi Rodin
Sagi Rodin is the CEO and co-founder of Frontegg, a customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform for B2B SaaS companies. He started coding at 14, served as a database instructor in the Israeli army, earned a computer software engineering degree from the Technion, and led cloud security work at Check Point before spinning the idea for Frontegg out of a problem he kept hitting: every new app needed the same login, user management, and admin plumbing built from scratch. Founded in 2019 with CTO Aviad Mizrachi, Frontegg has raised roughly $70 million and gives developers plug-and-play identity infrastructure so they can focus on their core product.
Rebag
Rebag is a New York-based online and retail marketplace for buying and selling pre-owned luxury handbags, watches, jewelry and accessories. Founded in 2014 by Charles Gorra, the company built proprietary technology - most notably Clair, an appraisal index, and Clair AI image recognition - to standardize resale pricing and pay sellers upfront. It aims to bring transparency and liquidity to what it calls an opaque secondary luxury market.
Novelship
Novelship is a Singapore-based online marketplace for buying and selling authentic sneakers, streetwear, apparel and collectibles across Asia-Pacific. Founded in 2018, it connects buyers and sellers through a bid-and-ask model, verifies every item in-house before it ships, and has grown into one of the region's largest platforms for limited-edition drops from brands like Nike, Jordan, Adidas, New Balance and ASICS.
Frontegg
Frontegg is a customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform that gives SaaS builders drop-in authentication, authorization, and user management so they don't have to build login, SSO, MFA, roles, and multi-tenancy from scratch. Founded in 2019 by two former Check Point engineers, the company has expanded from B2B user management into identity infrastructure for AI agents, launching Frontegg.ai and AgentLink to secure how AI systems and the Model Context Protocol access enterprise applications.
LoginRadius
LoginRadius is a Vancouver-headquartered customer identity and access management (CIAM) company that gives businesses a single platform to register, authenticate, and manage their end users at scale. Founded in 2012 as a social-login tool, it grew into a full identity-as-a-service suite covering single sign-on, passwordless login, passkeys, adaptive MFA, and no-code identity orchestration - with configurable data residency across 35+ regions to satisfy regulated industries. The platform is used by thousands of brands to secure large consumer bases while keeping login experiences fast and compliant.
ZITADEL
ZITADEL is an open-source identity and access management platform that gives developers enterprise-grade authentication and authorization without vendor lock-in. Built in Go with an API-first design and native multi-tenancy, it supports OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, SCIM, passkeys, MFA and self-service flows, and can run as a self-hosted deployment or as a managed cloud service. Founded in Switzerland in 2019 and now remote-first, ZITADEL aims to make identity a foundational piece of infrastructure - like a database or a web server - rather than a barrier to shipping software.
Cirrus Identity
Cirrus Identity is an Oakland-based software company that runs managed, cloud-hosted identity and access management for higher education, research institutions, non-profits and healthcare. Founded in 2013 by former UC Berkeley identity staff, it acts as a proxy and bridge between commercial identity providers (Entra ID, Okta, Duo, Google) and the multilateral research-and-education federations - InCommon, eduGAIN, the Canadian Access Federation and GakuNin - that campuses depend on but that most commercial IdPs do not support. More than 200 universities use it to retire aging Shibboleth deployments, let alumni and applicants log in with social accounts, and standardize authentication without rebuilding every application.
Dedra Chamberlin
Dedra Chamberlin is the founder and CEO of Cirrus Identity, an Oakland-based cloud identity company that helps more than 200 universities run single sign-on and federated login without the friction. She arrived at identity management sideways - a UC Berkeley psychology major with master's degrees in city planning and Latin American studies who volunteered for a one-year networking internship and never left. After two decades inside UC Berkeley and UCSF IT, where she rose to Deputy Director of Identity and Access Management and chaired the University of California's system-wide identity strategy workgroup, she founded Cirrus in 2013 to build the education-specific identity tools she wished vendors had made. She is a board member of SimpleSAMLphp and a founder of IAM-HER, a community advancing women in the identity field.
TBCASoft
TBCASoft is a Silicon Valley blockchain company building a consortium-based distributed ledger that lets telecom carriers, mobile payment apps and banks interoperate across borders. Its HIVEX payment network lets travelers pay with their home QR-code wallet abroad without merchants changing POS systems, while the CBSG Consortium and CCIS identity framework extend the same trust rails to digital identity and authentication. Founded in 2016 by Ling Wu, it is backed by SoftBank and Naver and connects payment apps reaching tens of millions of users across Asia.
The RealReal
The RealReal is the largest online marketplace for authenticated, pre-owned luxury goods. It pairs human expert authenticators with proprietary AI to vet handbags, watches, fine jewelry, apparel and home items before resale, handling consignment end to end - pricing, photography, listing and shipping. Founded in 2011 and public on Nasdaq since 2019, the company has grown to more than 30 million members and positions itself at the intersection of luxury, technology and sustainability.
Orisa Cherenfant
Orisa Cherenfant is SVP of Industry Relations & Strategic Growth at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering billions of messages, calls, and interactions globally. A first-generation college graduate from Cape Verde who earned dual degrees in Finance and Marketing from Boston College, she built her career through GE's leadership development programs before moving into tech. At Twilio, she leads industry partnerships and growth strategy, speaks at major conferences like MWC Barcelona and Twilio Signal, and was named a 2025 Entreprenista 100 Award winner. She is based in Los Angeles with her partner Eli and their twins, Margaux and Maverick.