Okta is named for the unit weather forecasters use to measure how much of the sky is covered by cloud. The name fit. By 2017 the average company ran dozens of cloud apps, and each one wanted its own password. Okta sat in front of all of them. A worker signed in once, and IT could add or cut off access from one screen. That spring, Okta filed to go public.

Two Salesforce Veterans

Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest both worked at Salesforce before they founded Okta in 2009. They had watched companies move their software to the cloud. Their bet was that identity would become the new security perimeter. If a company's apps lived on the internet, the login was the front door. Okta built a neutral service that worked with Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and thousands of smaller apps.

Thirty-Eight Percent Up

Okta priced its IPO at $17 a share on April 6, 2017, at the top of its range. It began trading on Nasdaq the next day and closed at $23.51, up about 38 percent. The company kept growing through the cloud boom. In 2021 it bought Auth0, a login service for developers, for about $6.5 billion. Okta still trades on Nasdaq as OKTA.

Cover: Cloudy Sky, Mediterranean Sea, Gustave Le Gray. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a cloudy sky (okta, the unit of cloud cover).