openid-connect
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Florian Forster Is Making the Login Box Carry Its Weight
A vehicle-electronics apprentice became an identity-infrastructure founder by refusing to treat authentication as a finished problem. Now Florian Forster is taking a Swiss-born open-source company to San Francisco - notifications, trade-offs and all.
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.