Who owns Okta? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Okta sells identity. Its software decides who is allowed to log in to an application, from an employee opening a work dashboard to a consumer signing in to a retailer's app. That single job has made Okta one of the most widely used security vendors in enterprise software, with total revenue of $2.61 billion in the fiscal year ended January 2025.

Ownership matters here for two reasons. First, Okta is a security company, and a security company's governance and incentives shape how seriously it treats its own risk, a question made sharp by two customer-facing breaches in 2022 and 2023. Second, Okta uses a dual-class structure that in many technology companies hands founders permanent control. At Okta, the math works out differently, and understanding why is the point of this article.

This piece breaks down who actually owns Okta: the founders, the institutional investors, the board, and the voting mechanics that decide who holds power.

Okta was founded in 2009 by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, who had both worked at Salesforce, where McKinnon led engineering. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and builds cloud-based identity and access management software. Its core products let organizations manage employee logins (workforce identity) and let businesses handle sign-in for their own customers (customer identity).

Okta went public on the Nasdaq on April 7, 2017, pricing its IPO at $17 per share and raising roughly $187 million. In the fiscal year ended January 31, 2025, Okta reported total revenue of $2.61 billion, up 15% year over year, with subscription revenue of $2.556 billion. As of September 2026, its market capitalization was roughly $29 billion.

Okta is a public company. Anyone can buy its Class A shares on the open market, and the overwhelming majority of the company is held by outside investors rather than insiders. What complicates the picture is the two-tier share structure Okta adopted at its IPO.

Okta has Class A and Class B common stock. Each Class A share carries one vote. Each Class B share carries ten votes and converts to a Class A share on transfer. As of the April 2025 record date, there were about 167.2 million Class A shares and 7.9 million Class B shares outstanding. Class B therefore accounts for less than 5% of shares but close to a third of the total vote.

The founders hold most of the remaining Class B stock, which is the source of whatever concentrated voting power exists. Okta's 2025 proxy shows Kerrest holding about 1.38 million Class B shares, held largely through family trusts and holding companies. McKinnon's stake is smaller and weighted toward stock options rather than owned shares.

The result is unusual for a founder-led technology company. Because Class B is such a thin slice of shares outstanding, the ten-vote multiplier does not give the founders a controlling block. Their combined voting power sits well below 10% of the total. That is a sharp contrast to peers where founders keep majority control through supervoting stock, such as the concentrated insider grip described in how CrowdStrike is owned. Okta's founders steer the company through their executive and board roles far more than through raw votes.

Okta raised venture funding before its IPO from firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures. Those early backers have largely exited or diluted down since 2017, and the register is now dominated by index funds and asset managers.

As of Okta's 2025 proxy statement, the disclosed holders above 5% were all large institutions:

FMR, the parent of Fidelity, is the largest single holder on a share basis. The Vanguard Group and BlackRock follow, holding their stakes mostly through index and exchange-traded funds that track the broad market. None of these firms takes an activist role; their influence runs through routine proxy voting rather than board seats.

With founders and insiders holding a low single-digit percentage of shares, Okta's public float is large. The vast majority of Class A stock trades freely, and because Class B is a small minority of the vote, ordinary Class A shareholders collectively hold most of the voting power. In practice, Okta is controlled by its public owners.

Todd McKinnon is the central figure. He is chief executive officer and chairperson of the board, combining day-to-day leadership with board oversight. Frederic Kerrest, the other co-founder, was chief operating officer until November 2023 and now serves as vice chairperson. He has since launched a venture firm, Windproof Partners, while keeping his board role.

The board added Jeff Epstein as lead independent director in June 2024, a common counterweight when the chief executive also chairs the board. Following the 2025 annual meeting, the board consisted of nine directors, most of them independent.

Control at Okta is therefore concentrated in roles rather than in votes. McKinnon shapes strategy as chief executive and chairperson, but he does so while answerable to a board and a shareholder base that could, in theory, outvote the founders.

In early 2022, the hacking group Lapsus$ posted screenshots suggesting access to Okta's internal systems. Okta traced the incident to Sitel, a third-party sub-processor that supplied customer-support contractors. A five-day window in January 2022 gave an attacker access to a Sitel machine that was logged into Okta. Okta said the maximum potential impact was 366 customers, roughly 2.5% of its base at the time. The episode drew criticism less for the intrusion itself than for the delay and confusion in Okta's disclosure, a serious reputational problem for a company that sells trust.

In October 2023, Okta disclosed that an attacker had accessed files in its customer-support case-management system between late September and mid-October. The files included HAR files containing session tokens, which could be used to hijack active sessions. Okta initially said 134 customers were affected, then later confirmed that data on all of its roughly 18,400 support users had been exposed. Several security firms disclosed that they were targeted through the incident, including the password manager whose ownership is covered in who owns 1Password, alongside BeyondTrust and the network-security vendor examined in who owns Cloudflare. The breach hit Okta's stock and renewed scrutiny of how a security vendor secures itself.

Beyond specific breaches, Okta faces a structural issue. Because so many companies route logins through Okta, a compromise of Okta is a compromise of its customers. Regulators and enterprise buyers increasingly treat identity providers as critical infrastructure, which raises the bar on Okta's own controls and disclosure practices. Any organization weighing that kind of single-vendor dependency would treat it as a live entry in a risk register, the sort of exposure a structured risk register template is built to track.

Okta's ownership structure decides who bears the consequences of the company's choices, and here the answer is unusually democratic for a founder-led technology firm. Because the dual-class structure does not hand the founders majority control, Okta's public shareholders and the large index funds that hold most of its stock carry real weight in governance. A dissatisfied shareholder base has more leverage at Okta than at a company where founders hold a supermajority of the vote.

That matters most in moments of stress. After the 2023 breach and a period of slowing growth, an ordinary shareholder could look to the board and, in principle, to the ballot for accountability, rather than facing a founder bloc that cannot be outvoted. The lead independent director role added in 2024 fits this pattern, providing a check on a chief executive who also chairs the board.

For customers, ownership shapes incentives. Okta's investors are long-term institutions that benefit from durable enterprise contracts, which rewards steady investment in security and reliability over short-term extraction. That alignment is not a guarantee, as the breaches showed, but it points the company toward protecting its most valuable asset, which is trust.

For the founders, the structure is a reminder that influence at Okta rests on performance and board confidence rather than on a permanent voting lock. McKinnon leads because he is chief executive and chairperson, not because he cannot be removed. Investors evaluating that leadership often start from the market capitalization, and a business valuation calculator is a simple way to translate Okta's revenue and growth into an implied worth.

Todd McKinnon is the chief executive officer of Okta. He co-founded the company in 2009 with Frederic Kerrest and also serves as chairperson of the board.

Yes. Okta has traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker OKTA since its initial public offering in April 2017, when it priced shares at $17.

Okta was founded in 2009 by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest. Both had previously worked at Salesforce, whose own ownership is broken down in who owns Salesforce, and McKinnon had led engineering there before starting Okta.

As of the 2025 proxy, the largest disclosed shareholders were institutional investors: entities affiliated with FMR (Fidelity), The Vanguard Group, and BlackRock, each holding roughly 5% to 10% of the shares. Co-founders Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest hold the bulk of the supervoting Class B stock but a small share of the company overall.

Yes. Okta acquired Auth0, a rival identity company focused on developers, in an all-stock deal valued at about $6.5 billion that closed in May 2021. Auth0's technology now underpins Okta's customer identity business.

Okta priced its IPO at $17 per share in 2017. Its market capitalization has fluctuated widely since, peaking during the 2021 software boom before falling sharply, and stood near $29 billion as of September 2026.