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Martin Gontovnikas, a.k.a Gonto, is a software engineer at heart who moved to the ‘dark side’ and became VP of Marketing at Auth0. He considers himself lucky to have found a way to combine his two passions and apply his engineering thinking model to marketing. Gonto’s analytical thinking is a huge driver of his data-driven approach to marketing strategy and experimental design. He is based in the Bay area, and in his spare time, can be found eating gourmet food at the best new restaurants, visiting every local brewery he can find, or traveling the globe in search of new experiences.

Former SVP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0

Martin Gontovnikas

The Identity-as-a-Service platform raises $9.3M to simplify secure identity implementation and management for developers everywhere.

**BELLEVUE, Wash.**--(BUSINESS WIRE)--[**Auth0**](https://auth0.com), the leading universal identity platform, today announced it has raised a total of $9.3M in funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation by K9 Ventures and others. The company will use the funds to support the high subscriber growth of its identity-as-a-service platform for developers, specifically focusing on expanding its marketing and customer success staff and developing additional product features to make strong identity security even easier for developers to implement and manage.

Auth0 is on a mission to simplify enterprise, social and custom identity management for developers everywhere. Vastly different from traditional authorization and authentication solutions, Auth0’s cloud platform makes strong authentication and authorization simple to implement for developers and IT administrators by augmenting and extending existing or new identity environments. With Auth0, developers no longer need deep vertical experience across authorization, authentication, identity management and security. Instead they can quickly leverage the world-class security and identity expertise of the Auth0 cloud service to secure modern mobile and web applications and APIs by simply adding a few lines of code, regardless of the complexity of the identity environment.

*“Implementing identity for anything more than the most trivial scenario has historically been a massive pain,”* said CEO Jon Gelsey. *“That pain translates both into weaker security and delays in shipping new applications, APIs or IoT devices. The friction of traditional identity implementation has often meant that developers are forced to trade strong identity security for on-time product launches. Auth0 makes strong identity security easy to implement without making any sacrifices.”*

While developers love Auth0 because it’s the fastest and simplest way to implement identity even in the most complex identity environments, their enterprises love Auth0 because it ensures their users always benefit from the latest state-of-the-art security features. This includes a sophisticated, configurable, and contextual [multifactor authentication](https://auth0.com/learn/multifactor-authentication/) capability as well as numerous additional security policies that developers can implement with a click.

*“It’s now painfully obvious that insecure or incomplete authentication implementations are creating vulnerabilities, jeopardizing customer trust, and hindering enterprise adoption of cloud and mobile services,”* observed VeriSign co-founder David Cowan, a partner at BVP. *“So Bessemer is thrilled to partner with the best identity team in the world to deliver secure login as a service — as easy to use as Twilio, SendGrid and Stripe.”* As part of the Series A round, Sunil Nagaraj of Bessemer Venture Partners will join the board of Auth0.

Auth0’s Series A funding of $6.875M, added to the $2.4M raised in a convertible seed round last September, brings its total raised to over $9M. The company plans to invest in marketing, customer success, and new product features to further extend and support its rapidly growing customer base. Auth0’s 20,000+ subscribers include world-class enterprises like *Schneider Electric*, *JetPrivilege*, and *Mindjet*. Auth0 subscribers are located in more than 150 countries worldwide. The Series A funding will enhance Auth0’s capability to deliver a platform that meets developers’ evolving needs.

<include src="asides/AboutAuth0" />

## About Bessemer Venture Partners

**Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP)** invests in early-stage and hyper-growth startups, partnering closely with entrepreneurs to build durable businesses. BVP is a global firm with offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Cambridge, New York, Bangalore and Herzliya. With $4 billion under management, BVP invests anywhere from $100,000 to $75 million in innovative companies like *Pinterest*, *Twilio*, *Box*, *LinkedIn*, *Shopify*, *Yelp*, *Skype* and *CornerstoneOnDemand**. Over 100 BVP companies have gone public – in the last three years alone, BVP has had 46 exits (IPO and M&A) and made new investments in more than 85 companies. Learn more at [www.bvp.com](http://www.bvp.com) and follow us on Twitter [@BessemerVP](https://twitter.com/BessemerVP).

## About K9 Ventures

**K9 Ventures** is a technology focused micro-VC fund led by Dr. Manu Kumar. K9 is based in Palo Alto, California and invests in teams of technical founders in Silicon Valley, who are creating new technology or opening new markets, with a direct revenue model. K9 primarily invests at the pre-seed or seed stage and has invested in several companies including *Lyft*, *Twilio*, *CardMunch*, *Occipital*, *NimbleVR*, *eShares*, *Coin*, *Osmo*, and more. K9 Ventures can be found on the web at [k9ventures.com](http://k9ventures.com) or on Twitter at [@K9Ventures](https://twitter.com/K9Ventures).

Auth0 Raises Series A Led By Bessemer to Take the Pain Out of Identity Security

Former Auth0 Employee

Jon Gelsey

Auth0 has raised an additional $6.875 million in Series A funding, led once again by Bessemer Venture Partners and K9 Ventures bringing our funding total to $9.3 million

Only nine short months after our [previous funding announcement](https://auth0.com/blog/2014/09/17/big-milestone/), we are proud to announce that Auth0 has raised an additional $6.875 million in Series A funding, led once again by [Bessemer Venture Partners](http://www.bvp.com/) and [K9 Ventures](http://www.k9ventures.com/) bringing our funding total to $9.3 million.

We’re also proud to announce that our subscriber base has grown to over 24,000 developers at over 20,000 enterprises across more than 150 countries around the world. We’re humbled by the rapid growth that we’ve experienced -- the Series A funding will even further enhance our ability to provide developers and IT staff with strong identity security across their enterprises.


<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="We are proud to announce that our subscriber base has grown to over 24,000 developers."/>

<img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/3GakzdMNjbEcgDU0Rxc1Q7/bc23737480d3ea5a5754db1099bf150b/chart-3" class="expand" />

Auth0 was founded to simplify identity implementation and management for developers everywhere. Historically, implementing identity for anything more than the most trivial scenario had always been a massive pain. The friction of traditional identity implementation has often meant that developers are forced to trade strong identity security for on-time product launches. With Auth0, developers and IT staff can now quickly secure modern mobile and web applications, APIs and IoT devices by adding just a few lines of code, regardless of the complexity of the identity environment. Our goal is to make strong identity security easy to implement with no compromises.

<blockquote>
 “It’s now painfully obvious that insecure or incomplete authentication implementations are creating vulnerabilities, jeopardizing customer trust, and hindering enterprise adoption of cloud and mobile services. So Bessemer is thrilled to partner with the best identity team in the world to deliver secure login as a service — as easy to use as Twilio, SendGrid and Stripe.”
 <author><a target="_new" href="http://www.bvp.com/team/david-cowan" style="margin-top: 20px; text-decoration: none; background-image: none; display: block"><img style="display: inline-block; border-radius: 100px; max-width: 40px; height: 40px; position: relative; margin: auto; margin-right: 10px;" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/5TiHhMqvGHewTIPGSV3VvC/06c130cd5ad5653b933b5ac5460cc5aa/VCjw8OdnuJ"/> David Cowan, VeriSign co-founder and partner at BVP.</a></author>
</blockquote>



We look forward to continuing to build and support simple-to-implement, strong identity security for our subscribers. You can read the [full funding announcement press release](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150624005699/en/Auth0-Raises-Series-Led-Bessemer-Pain-Identity#.VYqrSFxVikp) and stay up to date on our progress anytime by following us [@auth0](https://twitter.com/auth0).

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