Almost six months after it raised a $30 million Series C funding round, Auth0 announced this week that CEO Jon Gelsey is stepping down. He’ll be replaced by co-founder Eugenio Pace, and will assist in the transition.
Pace, a long-time Microsoft veteran before founding Auth0 with CTO Matias Woloski in 2013, will take over as the company looks to carve out a slice of the single sign-on market. As companies add dozens of internal and external cloud services to their enterprise software toolboxes, ensuring security and compliance across all those services becomes much harder, and single sign-on products help manage that complexity.
There are a lot of big players in this market: Okta went public last year and has been growing steadily, and Pace’s former employer also enjoys a fair amount of business in this market with its Active Directory product. Auth0 said it doubled its customer list in 2017 to over 3,000 companies, including some pretty large corporations like Siemens and Nvidia. Earlier this year Gelsey told GeekWire that Auth0 had been seeing a lot of traction outside the U.S., and it opened offices in London, Tokyo, and Sydney during the year to accommodate that growth.
Pace spent several years at Microsoft in its patterns and practices group, which sought to understand and improve the cloud software user experience. He held a variety of technical and leadership roles at Microsoft over a 13-year stint working for the software giant.
(Editor’s note: An incorrect version of the press release announcing Pace’s promotion was sent to GeekWire, and this post has been updated to clarify Gelsey’s plans and that Auth0’s customer list doubled in the past year.)
