Okta, Inc.

CybersecurityFounded 2009

Market Data Current As Of: September 12, 2026

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Okta, Inc.

CybersecurityFounded 2009

Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya

Last reviewed: September 12, 2026

Market Data Current As Of: September 12, 2026

Founders

Who Founded Okta?

Todd McKinnon, Frederic Kerrest · Founded 2009 · San Francisco, California, United States

Quick Answer

Okta was founded by Todd McKinnon, Frederic Kerrest in 2009 in San Francisco, California, United States. The company is currently led by Todd McKinnon.

Founding Story

In 2008, Todd McKinnon was Head of Engineering at Salesforce, where he witnessed the explosive early migration of enterprise applications to the cloud. McKinnon realized that as companies adopted dozens of separate SaaS tools (Salesforce, Google Apps, Box), employees were overwhelmed by dozens of different passwords, while corporate IT departments had zero centralized visibility into who had access to corporate data. McKinnon teamed up with Salesforce colleague Frederic Kerrest to build a cloud-native identity platform originally named 'Saaspass' before renaming it 'Okta' (a meteorological term for cloud cover). Launching during the depths of the 2009 Great Recession, McKinnon presented his wife with a 30-slide PowerPoint business plan to justify leaving his lucrative executive job. By engineering a reliable single sign-on engine that worked across any web browser and cloud vendor, Todd and Frederic created the modern cloud identity category.

Todd McKinnon

Background

Todd McKinnon earned a Bachelor's in Management Information Systems from BYU and a Master's in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill, later serving as Head of Engineering at Salesforce.

Role at Okta, Inc.

Todd McKinnon is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Okta. In 2009, McKinnon left Salesforce to create the cloud-native identity management category. McKinnon guided Okta from inception through its 2017 NASDAQ IPO, executed the $6.5B Auth0 acquisition, and established Okta as the defining Zero Trust identity standard.

Frederic Kerrest

Background

Frederic Kerrest earned a Computer Science degree from Stanford University and an MBA from MIT Sloan, working in sales leadership at Salesforce.

Role at Okta, Inc.

Frederic Kerrest is the Co-Founder and former Executive Vice Chairman of Okta. Kerrest architected Okta's enterprise sales strategy, corporate operations, and global partner ecosystem.

Okta, Inc.: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Brett Tighe

Chief Financial Officer

2022 – Present

Financial strategist who drove Okta's operating leverage, expanding free cash flow margins past 20% while sustaining double-digit revenue growth.

Eugenio Pace

President of Customer Identity Cloud (Auth0 Co-Founder)

2021 – Present

Co-founder of Auth0 who continues to lead Okta's developer-centric customer identity engineering and API innovation.

Todd McKinnon

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer

2009 – Present

Visionary co-founder who built Okta from a living-room startup into a $12.5B NASDAQ cybersecurity leader, architecting the Auth0 merger and AI security strategy.

Compare Okta, Inc. With Competitors

Okta, Inc. vs Palo Alto Networks, Inc. →Okta, Inc. vs Snyk →Okta, Inc. vs Abnormal Security →Okta, Inc. vs Tailscale →

Who Founded Okta? FAQ

Who founded Okta, Inc. and in what year was it established?

Okta, Inc. was founded in 2009 by Todd McKinnon, Frederic Kerrest in San Francisco, California, United States.

What was the original founding vision for Okta, Inc.?

The founders established Okta, Inc. with the objective of solving core inefficiencies in Cybersecurity, Enterprise Identity & Access Management (IAM), Cloud Security, Customer Identity (CIAM) & Zero Trust Architecture, laying the foundation for its current global scale.

How does Okta, Inc. preserve its founding principles today?