Okta

About

Okta was co-founded in January 2009 by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest in San Francisco ¹². Both founders previously held senior roles at Salesforce — McKinnon as VP of Engineering leading a team of 300 developers, and Kerrest in business development ²³. The company was originally named SaaSure Inc. before rebranding to Okta in 2010 ¹.

McKinnon left Salesforce during the 2008 recession, convinced that cloud computing would transform enterprise software. He famously prepared a Google Slides presentation for his wife titled “Proposal to move to a new job starting a company (Why I’m not crazy)” ³. The founders initially envisioned cloud-based system management tools, but pivoted to identity management after discovering that prospects most urgently needed a way to manage employee access to cloud applications ³.

Okta went public on the NASDAQ on April 7, 2017, under the ticker OKTA, pricing its IPO at $17 per share and raising approximately $187 million ⁴⁵. The stock opened at $23.51, well above the offering price ⁵. As of March 2026, Okta is a publicly traded company with over 19,000 customers ⁶.

Funding History

What Investors Say

Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Okta’s seed round was the first check ever written from the firm’s inaugural fund ⁷. Floodgate (Mike Maples Jr.) joined as an investor in the Series B round alongside Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures ⁹¹⁰. SV Angel (Ron Conway) invested in the Series F round in 2015 ¹⁰¹⁴.

No independently sourced direct quotes from investors about Okta were found.

What Founders Say

Todd McKinnon on the founding insight: “Being a part of Salesforce, seeing everything take off — AWS, Google Apps — it was clear to me there was going to be a cloud version of everything in the stack” ³.

McKinnon and Kerrest on discovering the identity opportunity: “We looked around, we talked about it a bunch and we saw that identity was going to be a huge opportunity” ³.

Frederic Kerrest on the early fundraising: “The first check that they wrote out of their first fund in the summer of 2009 was into our seed round” ⁷. He recalled the pressure: “When you’re trying to build your first big technology company and you’re sitting there trying to get $10-15 million to get going as a company. Very, very intimidating” ⁷.

Kerrest on investor selection: “We tried to put folks around the table who were operators, who had the experience doing exactly what we were trying to do” ⁷.

Sources