identity-management
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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.
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.
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.