authentication
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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.
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.
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.
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.