All companies often have trouble verifying users and determining whether they are legit or not. This used to be a painful process considering it’s a tricky thing to distinguish such occurrences.

Luckily, Auth0 came to the scene and as a helping hand to many businesses that try to overcome this problem. The co-founders Eugenio Pace and Matias Woloski decided to finally create a system that would help every global enterprise facing complex identity-use processes.

The platform they made is highly beneficial for companies that have trouble verifying users and getting to know if they are legitimate or not. Moreover, Auth0 can differentiate if the said user is capable of going into action in terms of approving or submitting various activities.

Read the story of Eugenio Pace and Matias Woloski and how they came to build a whole company from the group up!

Background and Early Life

Eugenio Pace’s childhood was much like everyone’s. He was a smart kid who was taught to always cherish and value his family above all - a trait he nurtures even today. In 1987, he enrolled in the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires in Argentina and started his BA in electrical engineering. In 1994, he started working on his Master’s in Computer Science, which he completed in 1999.

The most interesting part of Eugenio’s life is his professional life. He started his journey with a company right after college, but unfortunately, it failed almost immediately. This experience, however, didn’t break his spirit to swim in the enterprise waters again, even though it took him a decade to reenter them.

After having a break from the failure, he teamed up with a close friend of his, Matias Woloski, and started Auth0 at the age of 42. The leap of faith didn’t happen quickly, courtesy of his unsuccessful first try, but his wife helped him gain the courage to do so. The two friends were 7,000 miles apart at the time, but the distance was nothing compared to their idea of creating Auth0.

Matias Woloski, the other co-founder of Auth0, is a Software Architect. He is specialized in both cloud computing and identity. Even in his childhood, he had always shown a passion for crafting frictionless products, which was later coupled with the love of building teams.

For the past 12 years, he has used these skills to work on achieving his life goals. He designed and developed software and took the best of emerging technologies, helping all companies he had worked in grow.

Matias is also co-author of three books, including “Developing Applications for the Cloud”, “Moving Applications to the Cloud”, and the “Claims Based Identity and Access Control Guide”.

Previous Experience

Eugenio Pace’s professional career started in 1997 when he was working at a private bank in Argentina called Banco Galicia. His position was as a developer in the finance sector. Although he was good at his job, he felt like he could have done more with his skills. Eugenio’s ambitions also played a big role when he decided to change jobs three years later, in 2000.

He then joined Microsoft on Feb 1, 2013. During this time, Microsoft Azure was still called Windows Azure. After proving his skills and ideas, Eugenio landed the position of Principal Lead Program Manager.

This was the time when the Cloud was becoming a thing. One of the projects he was working on was identifying blockers for adoption for developers. After diving deep into this field, one thing led to another; thus, Auth0 was born.

Matias, on the other hand, started first at Freelance.NET Developer in 2001. He then went on to co-found several other companies but left his spot in those to help Eugenio build Auth0.

Launching the Auth0 Platform

The platform was launched in 2013 in Bellevue, Washington, United States. It currently has employees in over 30 countries and three main headquarters. These are located in Seattle, Buenos Aires, and London.

Moreover, there are three secondary offices in Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore. Although there are nearly 1,000 employees throughout all offices, the leadership team comprises several people, with Eugenio Pace as co-founder and CEO and Matias Woloski as the other co-founder and CTO.

Auth0 is a service for developers that solves two problems. These include the authentication and authorization problems of any kind of application.

In other words, Auth0 will help developers determine whether a certain user is a legitimate system user. Moreover, this software will provide additional information, like entitlements. This includes whether or not they can approve an expense report, can they submit an expense report, can they read an article and similar actions.

The connection between the cloud and mobile apps with different companies is made by simplifying the sign-on setup.

Up until now, Auth0 has proven to be a great tool that helps all companies in detecting real identities. What started as a small idea developed into a tool everyone can benefit from.

Funding Cycles

There are quite a few investors that saw the bright future Auth0 is directed towards. This company managed to get a total funding amount of $332.3 million. The cash flow happened over the course of 6 years from different investors.

All in all, Auth0 managed to get 10 funding rounds, with 17 investors in total, out of which 5 were lead investors.

Bessemer Venture Partners, which is a venture capital company that invests in startups of all stages, consumer, healthcare, and enterprise, put $2.4 million into Auth0 on Sep 17, 2014. This was the company's first significant income, thanks to which the company got a firm head start.

The next investment occurred on Jun 24, 2015, by the same investor only this time they added $6.9 million to Auth0’s balance. Trinity Ventures joined the ride on Aug 24, 2016, when they invested $15 million.

The theme of having the last gained funds larger than the previous one continued on Jun 27, 2017, when Meritech Capital Partners invested $30 million more in Auth0’s funds. On Sep 23, 2017, an anonymous investor funded the company, followed by Sapphire Ventures’ $55 million on May 15, 2018.

Sapphire Ventures realized their great move, which led them to invest an additional $103 million almost exactly a year later, on May 20, 2019. Salesforce Ventures was the last company to invest in Auth0 with $120 million, which occurred on Jul 14, 2020. The same year, Auth0 acquired Apility.io, an API that checks if a domain or IP address is legal and not blacklisted.

Future Goals and Plans

The founders of the Auth0 Identification Platform are certain that even in the future, Auth0 will keep providing a contemporary approach to identity and allow enterprises to give safe access to any application for every user.

In the foreseeable future, the team of this company expects to fully wrap up and launch a completely adaptable platform. This platform can be as basic or as flexible as any company's development team wants.

Another thing is that Auth0 will soon adjust to an environment that will be able to protect billions of login transactions on a monthly basis. Such growth will allow all types of clients to focus on their plans and innovation while maintaining simplicity, privacy, and security.

And the thing that fortifies these developments is the fact that the founders never even thought of selling the company. This would mean that Auth0 will keep on growing uninterrupted by any inside turmoil.