Okta

Okta sells cloud software that controls how employees, customers and partners sign in to applications, including single sign-on, multifactor authentication, lifecycle management and developer identity APIs. Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, who had worked together at Salesforce, founded the company in San Francisco in 2009 as SaaSure Inc. They renamed it Okta in 2010, after the meteorological unit for measuring cloud cover. Okta runs on Amazon Web Services and hosts an annual Oktane customer conference.

Andreessen Horowitz backed the company early, and Ben Horowitz joined the board in February 2010. Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital came in over later rounds. Sequoia partner Patrick Grady joined the board in May 2014. Between July and September 2015 Okta sold $75.0 million of Series F preferred stock at $12.02 per share, a round reported at a $1.2 billion valuation. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia each bought about $22.4 million of it, Greylock $14.7 million and Khosla $0.5 million. All of the preferred stock, about 59.5 million shares, converted to common at the IPO.

Okta listed on Nasdaq under OKTA in April 2017, selling 11 million Class A shares at $17.00, or $187 million gross. At the time Sequoia owned 21.2 percent of the company, Andreessen Horowitz 19.6 percent, Greylock 16.9 percent and Khosla 8.1 percent, and Okta had more than 3,100 customers. Revenue was $41.0 million in fiscal 2015 and $160.3 million in fiscal 2017. In 2021 Okta bought Auth0 for $6.5 billion, adding a developer identity platform. Revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026 was $2.92 billion, according to its annual report. A 2023 breach of its customer support system affected every Okta customer and remains one of the main events in its public history.

Okta is a textbook case of early venture capital ownership surviving to a public listing. The four venture firms together owned roughly 66 percent of the company before the IPO. Andreessen Horowitz held about a fifth of the company eight years after its first check. Sequoia and Greylock, which came in after a16z, still owned more than a third combined at listing. The company's growth after the IPO, including the Auth0 deal, points to identity as a large standalone software category rather than a feature of broader platforms.