identity-management
(18)
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.
Micha Hershman Has a Marketing Playbook for AI - and a Dojo for Everything Else
He went from shelving graphic novels to scaling SaaS companies. Now JumpCloud's CMO spends his days governing AI agents and his evenings teaching people how to stay calm when plans collapse.
Rippling Wants One Employee Record to Run the Whole Company
The $16.8 billion software company started with onboarding and kept going - into payroll, laptops, app access, corporate cards, compliance, and AI. The wager is simple: if worker data is clean, the back office can finally stop copying and pasting.
Your Community Migration Ends Where the Admin Work Begins
Moving members is the visible job. The lasting work is designing permissions, identity, moderation and releases that a real team can safely operate after launch.
Raz Rafaeli Has Spent 30 Years Making Passwords Look Old
Long before passwordless became a category, Raz Rafaeli was building network tools and running infrastructure companies. His latest act is a ten-year campaign against the credential that refuses to retire.
Flip Bet the Office Was the Wrong Place to Start AI - Now 2 Million Frontline Workers Are Catching Up
Flip started with a Porsche factory-floor communication gap and survived when Porsche paused the project. Eight years later, its next wager is bigger: AI will matter at work only when it reaches the people who do not have an inbox.
Multifactor
Multifactor is a San Francisco cybersecurity startup, part of Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, that lets people and AI agents access online accounts without ever exposing the underlying passwords. Using patented post-quantum cryptography, it turns any account - a bank, an inbox, an internal tool - into a shareable, revocable 'read-only' link, the way Google Docs shares a document. Founded by former CIA cyber officer Vivek Nair and ex-NASA cryptographer Colin Roberts, the company raised a $15M seed round in December 2025 led by Nexus Venture Partners.
LastPass
LastPass is a cloud-based password and identity management company that lets people, families and businesses store, generate and share credentials from an encrypted vault protected by zero-knowledge, AES-256 encryption. Founded in 2008 and now an independent company again after spinning off from GoTo in 2024, LastPass serves more than 100,000 businesses and tens of millions of users worldwide. Under CEO Karim Toubba, the company is expanding beyond password management into a broader 'Secure Access Essentials' platform that adds SaaS/AI app discovery, access control and single sign-on directly through the browser.
EverOps
EverOps is a San Francisco-based IT and cloud managed services provider that embeds small teams of senior engineers - called TechPods - directly inside client organizations to run DevOps, SRE, ITOps, and security work. Founded in 2012 and re-capitalized in 2022, the firm pitches itself as an alternative to advice-only consulting and staffing shops: pods sit in the client's toolchain, attend standups, and take ownership of outcomes across cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, observability, and cloud cost reduction.
Secret Double Octopus
Secret Double Octopus is an enterprise cybersecurity company that helps organizations eliminate passwords. Its Octopus / ZeroPassword platform delivers phishing-resistant, passwordless multi-factor authentication across workstations, cloud apps, legacy systems and on-prem infrastructure. Founded in 2015 in Israel, the company's technology traces back to secret-sharing cryptography once used to protect nuclear launch codes, and it now processes hundreds of millions of authentications a year for mid-market to Fortune 50 customers in regulated industries.
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.
Eric Olden
Eric Olden is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Strata Identity, the Boulder-based company behind the Maverics identity orchestration platform. With more than 25 years in the identity field, he co-authored the SAML federation standard, built the first web single sign-on product and the first Identity-as-a-Service company, and led Oracle's global identity and security division before launching Strata. He has been called the father of modern identity management and holds 13 US patents.
Ev Kontsevoy
Ev Kontsevoy is the co-founder and CEO of Teleport, a cybersecurity company building the identity-native infrastructure access platform trusted by organizations like Samsung, NASDAQ, and IBM. A serial entrepreneur who grew up in Siberia and studied applied mathematics, he previously co-founded Mailgun (acquired by Rackspace in 2012) before starting Teleport in 2015 to eliminate the fragmented, secrets-based approach to infrastructure security. Under his leadership, Teleport reached a $1.1B valuation with its $110M Series C, and he authored an O'Reilly book on identity-native infrastructure access management. He is now focused on defining agentic identity frameworks for the era of AI-driven enterprise infrastructure.
John Pritchard
Dr. John Pritchard is the CEO of Radiant Logic, where he leads a platform that unifies identity data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments for Fortune 500 enterprises. With a PhD in open innovation in AI from the University of Denver and over 25 years spanning Lockheed Martin, IBM, Adobe, and Okta, Pritchard joined Radiant Logic in 2022 as Chief Product Officer and expanded the company from a virtual directory provider into an AI-powered Identity Security Posture Management platform - before being appointed CEO in January 2025. He is a Forbes Technology Council contributor, Identiverse keynote speaker, and a vocal advocate for treating identity data as a strategic organizational asset.
Karim Toubba
Karim Toubba is the CEO of LastPass, the world's leading password manager with over 100,000 business customers and millions of consumers. A 25-year cybersecurity veteran, he previously led Kenna Security to a successful Cisco acquisition in 2021 and has held executive roles at Juniper Networks and Digital Island. He joined LastPass in April 2022, just months before a major security breach, and has since led a comprehensive transformation of the company's security posture, infrastructure, and culture - turning crisis into opportunity.
Todd McKinnon
Todd McKinnon is the co-founder and CEO of Okta, the leading independent identity platform, which he built from a two-person startup in 2009 into a publicly traded company with over 18,000 customers and $2 billion in annual revenue. A former head of engineering at Salesforce, McKinnon saw the cloud shift coming before most and bet his career - and his family's financial security - on the idea that identity would become the new security perimeter. He has led Okta through its 2017 NASDAQ IPO, a $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0 in 2021, and a high-profile 2022 security breach, emerging from each as a more seasoned, candid, and mission-driven leader.