authorization
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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.
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.
PlainID
PlainID is an Israeli cybersecurity company and the recognized pioneer of Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC). Its authorization platform lets enterprises define, manage, and enforce who can access what across applications, data, APIs, microservices, and - increasingly - AI agents, replacing the tangle of hard-coded access rules scattered across systems with centralized, dynamic, real-time policy decisions. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Tel Aviv with a strong New York presence, PlainID has raised roughly $99-100M and serves Fortune 500 organizations across financial services, healthcare, telecom, and government.
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.
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.
Oren Harel
Oren Ohayon Harel is the CEO and co-founder of PlainID, the Tel Aviv- and New York-based authorization company that turned policy-based access control (PBAC) from an XACML white paper into a category. He founded PlainID in 2014 with Gal Helemski and Dmitry Tuchinsky after a decade spent inside Israeli banking security, most recently as Deputy CISO at Bank Hapoalim. He raised a $75M Series C led by Insight Partners in December 2021, bringing PlainID's total funding to roughly $100M.