The security startup, Akto, allows users to discover, test, and find API vulnerabilities in a minute. Security and engineering teams can evaluate their APIs utilizing the Akto platform by taking API inventory, testing and finding business logic vulnerabilities, and monitoring issues in run-time. With 30 million developers using APIs every day, the Akto team discovered an opportunity to address the constant addition and modification of APIs and protect their customers from harmful data leaks.
In our sit-down with the team, Ankita Gupta, CEO and Co-founder, shared more about Akto’s product-led growth model that helps their customers jump into the platform and start for free in a minute. “From day one, we wanted to make it a product-led product. Early on, we realized that it’s more of a security engineer problem than a CISO problem, so we needed a bottom-up model.” (Fun fact: Auth0 also offers a product-led growth model that helps our customers get started immediately. We are always delighted to hear when other companies are doing the same!)
Ankita shared more about Akto’s decision to open source and everything they’ve developed so far. The team saw that their customers wanted to contribute, add custom tests, or add custom rules for their business case, so open source made sense. Once the results were in, they were met with customer praise and felt customers were more comfortable with customization. The Akto team strongly believes that open sourcing will help developers and security teams around the world secure their application APIs from attacks. Ankush Jain, Co-Founder and CTO, shared, “We are building the platform by being transparent to the security community and getting the community’s help in building the product.”
Letting Auth0 Take Care of the Login Box
When the Akto team was building their product, they knew that login flow was one of the biggest problems they or any startup will have, but they didn’t want to build it themselves. “It’s been a very smooth journey for us; we don’t have to think of anything around login now,” said Ankita. They use Auth0 for their primary login page, where customers can sign up and start their onboarding journey. A few features that make this possible and frictionless are email verification, Social Login, and password recovery. They also built a custom login in-house, but compared to their Auth0 login flow, they saw reliability issues, especially with fake emails. With Auth0, they were not only able to streamline their customer onboarding experience but also receive accurate data for their business.
Join Akto and the other 1700+ startups that benefit from Auth0
The Auth0 for Startups program brings the simplicity, extensibility, and scalability of Auth0 to qualifying startups – all free for one year. We are passionate about helping startups get their applications up and running while we take care of identity needs. So much so that we recently expanded our eligibility by increasing the funding limit to $5M, doubling our previous cap. If you have any questions, you can find us at startups@auth0.com or apply here.
A special thank you to Ankita, Ankush, and the entire Akto team. If your organization wants to secure your APIs in a minute, get started today.
This profile is the second installment in our series highlighting members of the Auth0 for Startups program. The Auth0 for Startups program began in 2020 and has since worked with 1700+ startups.
