Okta was founded in 2009 by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, both former Salesforce executives. They saw that as companies adopted more cloud applications, managing employee identities and access across dozens of services was becoming a nightmare. Okta’s solution was a cloud-based identity platform.
The company went public on Nasdaq in 2017 and grew rapidly as enterprises migrated to cloud-first architectures. In 2021, Okta made its biggest move by acquiring Auth0, a developer-focused identity platform, for $6.5 billion. The deal combined Okta’s enterprise strength with Auth0’s developer-friendly approach.
Okta’s Workforce Identity Cloud handles single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), lifecycle management, and API access management for employees. The Customer Identity Cloud (powered by Auth0) provides authentication and authorization for consumer-facing applications.
The platform integrates with over 7,000 applications through its Integration Network, making it one of the most connected identity providers. Over 18,000 organizations use Okta, including major enterprises like JetBlue, Nordstrom, and T-Mobile.
Okta suffered a significant reputational hit in late 2023 when attackers breached its customer support system and accessed data from multiple clients, including Cloudflare and 1Password. The incident underscored the irony of an identity security company being compromised.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Okta employs over 5,000 people. Annual revenue exceeded $2.4 billion in fiscal 2024. Despite the security incident, the company’s market position in identity remains strong — the identity and access management category continues to grow as organizations move more workloads to the cloud.
