AUTH0

Eugenio Pace and Matias Woloski were colleagues at Microsoft in Buenos Aires when they got fed up watching developers reinvent authentication from scratch on every project. They left to build Auth0 in 2013, pitching it as a universal identity platform — plug it in, get login, MFA, and social authentication in minutes.

They moved to the US, went through Y Combinator, and scaled by targeting developers first and enterprises second.

B2B SaaS with a freemium developer entry point. Developers use Auth0 for free up to 7,000 monthly active users.

Above that, pricing scales by MAUs and features. Enterprise contracts added SSO, compliance tooling, and dedicated support.

The developer-first funnel fed enterprise sales — a playbook later copied by dozens of infrastructure startups.

[ "Universal Login — a hosted, customizable login page that handles authentication flows across web, mobile, and APIs", "Actions — serverless JavaScript functions that customize the authentication pipeline without custom infrastructure", "Auth0 Marketplace — a catalog of integrations with third-party identity and security tools" ]

Developer love first. They invested heavily in documentation, SDKs for every language, and community support.

When a developer used Auth0 in a side project and then joined a company, they often brought Auth0 with them. Bottom-up adoption drove enterprise deals without requiring a traditional sales team in the early years.

Competing against AWS Cognito, Firebase Auth, and Microsoft Azure AD, all of which are bundled with cloud infrastructure developers already use. Winning against free and bundled is hard.

Auth0's edge was the developer experience — their docs and SDKs were simply better.

Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Trinity Ventures, World Innovation Lab, and Telstra Ventures across six funding rounds from 2014 to 2020.