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To paraphrase Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
The Descope team certainly lived the heck out of 2025, pulling out all the stops to introduce new product capabilities, give developers more choice and flexibility, and expand and close our seed round with $88M in total funding. This annual tradition (see recaps for 2023 and 2024) now gives me an opportunity to understand 2025 backwards and reflect on our past 12 months of product innovation, customer adoption, and industry validation.
Shipping with speed and security
One of our guiding principles is to bring features to market with agility and simplicity while taking a long-term view on aspects like security, availability and resilience. In 2025, our team launched a host of capabilities to improve user and tenant admin experience, enhance developer flexibility, and help organizations securely deploy AI agents and MCP servers with identity controls built-in.
Complete customer SSO
Supporting single sign-on is not a single “yes / no” toggle. Organizations need specific SSO flows and modalities, easy onboarding for their customers’ tenant admins, and no-hassle migration of existing SSO connections. In 2025, we launched multiple capabilities to become a full-service customer SSO solutions for any business or partner application:
Supporting multiple IdPs per SSO tenant for complex enterprise use cases.
Providing self-service SSO and SCIM configuration to tenant admins with the SSO Setup Suite.
Zero-downtime SSO migration to consume and migrate existing SSO connections (home-grown and with incumbent providers) without any re-configuration needed by tenant admins.
David Li, Senior Software Engineer at You[.]com, said:
"We love Descope SSO flows from a CX standpoint. A customer we onboarded just told us it was the fastest implementation ever. It usually takes weeks but we were done in 15 minutes— small talk included!"
Abraham Jeevagunta, Head of Advanced Concepts at Cequence Security, said:
“I have not seen any customer support calls for single sign-on in the last year and a half. Customers log in to the product, and if they have questions on SSO, our support team highlights where the UI points to the documentation. We rarely hear back from them after they have that.”
Tomer Yona, Head of Solutions Engineering at Notch, said:
“We were able to turn on SSO almost instantly, and our customer’s IT team loved how intuitive and polished the setup experience was. It reflected well on Notch and made the onboarding process feel enterprise-grade.”
Developer flexibility
One of our guiding principles is that every customer is slightly different (and that matters). We continue to foster a product and DevRel culture that meets customers where they are rather than forcing them to adapt. In 2025, we launched a host of capabilities to provide developers even more freedom when integrating Descope into their apps:
Bring Your Own Screen: Customers can utilize custom screens and maintain full control over their UI while also leveraging the no / low code identity orchestration logic of Descope Flows.
External Tokens: Customers can modernize their authentication with Descope without changing the makeup of their backend tokens.
FGA Cache: Customers can locally cache their authorization graphs and evaluate permissions up to 100 times faster than remote evaluation.
Agentic Identity Hub
2025 was the year AI agents began to go mainstream, but identity is still a bottleneck for both developers and security teams. On one hand, MCP builders and AI agent developers struggle to meet the production-readiness needs of enterprise security teams. On the other hand, security teams struggle to secure agentic AI against OWASP Top 10 threats without stifling innovation.
At the root of all these challenges is a realization: AI agents are fundamentally different actors within enterprise systems compared to human users and machine identities. Thus, organizations need dedicated identity systems for AI agents based on ephemeral credentials, delegated access, and ongoing compliance with protocols like MCP.
Descope began solving these challenges in early 2025 with Inbound Apps, Outbound Apps, and the Agentic Identity Control Plane, culminating in the release of Agentic Identity Hub 2.0 in January 2026. Organizations are now able to use Descope as a dedicated identity provider for AI agents, enabling them to:
Manage AI agents as first-class identities alongside human users
Securely connect their external and internal-facing MCP servers to MCP clients
Provide short-lived, scoped tokens to AI agents accessing downstream services
Govern agent access to MCP servers and resources with enterprise-grade policy enforcement
Several organizations are already using Agentic Identity Hub in production. Tanish Lad, Founding Engineer at WisdomAI, said:
“Descope has been super helpful in managing auth for both our MCP server as well as for managing OAuth tokens when Wisdom connects to various other MCP servers. Both flows have been extremely smooth.”
Eldad Rudich, Co-Founder and CTO at Daylight Security, said:
“Managing auth for an MCP server can be complex and time-consuming. The Descope auth and access control layer for MCP is easy to set up and maintain. It lets us securely expose our MCP server to end users with role and scope-based access controls without needing to become experts on the MCP auth spec.”
Strengthening the ecosystem
Identity touches every part of the business. A modern identity provider needs to be interoperable with other systems and provide practitioners easy ways to integrate with their preferred modes of operation. In 2025, Descope added a number of connectors and agentic connections to take our “drag & drop auth” approach far and wide:
Fraud prevention connectors with Arkose Labs, Forter, Fingerprint, Darwinium, and Bitsight TI to help customers prevent account takeover, credential stuffing, and other forms of broken authentication.
Audit connectors with Splunk, Coralogix, Google Cloud Logging, and OpenTelemetry to stream authentication events and audit logs to downstream observability tools.
An LDAP connector to authenticate users against an LDAP directory server using username / password authentication and mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication.
Vercel Marketplace integrations for user auth and MCP auth alongside an MCP starter template.
Integrations with FastMCP, Reflex, Skyflow, and Golf.dev to help developers secure MCP servers and AI agents.
Setting the standard
In 2025, we were delighted to receive FedRAMP High Authorization, enabling government agencies and organizations requiring FedRAMP-authorized software to use Descope for any customer, partner, or agentic IAM needs. We followed it up with supporting PCI DSS – receiving an Attestation of Compliance for Self-Assessment Questionnaire D for Service Providers (PCI DSS SAQ-D AOC).
Descopers in droves
With over 1200 organizations in production and hundreds of millions of total identities under management, our kaleidoscope of customers in 2025 was more colorful than ever. The year-on-year growth stats make me want to give our DevOps team a hearty handshake:
A 300% increase in monthly active users logging in to customer apps using Descope
A 4600% increase in B2B organizational tenants with users logging in using Descope
A 1655% increase in total identities under management
Our platform’s flexibility lends itself well to any app–from seed-stage startups and rapidly growing scaleups to planetscale consumer apps and Fortune 500 enterprises with complex B2B2X hierarchies.
Innovative AI security, data, and compliance startups like 7AI, Reco, WisdomAI, Vega Security, Delve, Zafran Security, and Daylight Security.
Growth-stage companies like 6Sense, Formstack, You.com, and Elementor.
Consumer apps with tens of millions of monthly active users like GoFundMe, GoodRx, and Linktree.
Unicorns and decagons like Databricks and Navan.
Organizations in regulated industries like Owens & Minor, Branch, and Revo Insurance.
Being drag & drop auth for “any app” comes with a responsibility to continue meeting the diverse needs of every app. We instituted an advisory board in 2025 to provide critical inputs that will govern product and roadmap direction while keeping customer needs at the center.
Arnie Katz, Chief Product and Technology Officer, GoFundMe
Naveen Zutshi, Chief Information Officer, Databricks
Nitin Shingate, Chief Technology Officer, GoodRx
Deepa Gopinath, Chief Information Officer, MongoDB
Yaron Blachman, Chief Information Security Officer, OpenWeb
Saurabh Sharma, Chief Product Officer, You[.]com
Analysts / industry validation
In addition to customer adoption, we were thrilled to receive recognition from analysts and the industry at large. Being included in the CRN Stellar Startup, Redpoint Infrared 100, Rising in Cyber, and Fortune Cyber 60 lists alongside other disruptive companies remains a source of pride.
Moving on to the analyst world, recognition spanned the gamut from specific product capabilities to company maturity:
Descope received an Honorable Mention in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Access Management
Descope was named a Representative Vendor for our journey-time orchestration capabilities in three Gartner Hype Cycles
Descope was named a Representative Vendor in the 2025 Gartner® Innovation Insight for Customer & Partner IAM
Descope was named a Challenger in 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass reports for Passwordless and CIAM
Descope was named a Leader in the 2025 Frost Radar for NHI Solutions for our agentic identity capabilities
Dolores Aleman, Frost & Sullivan analyst and lead author of the Frost Radar, said:
“Descope has rapidly positioned itself as an agentic identity innovator in 2025, with a strong emphasis on AI agent and MCP (Model Context Protocol) security ecosystems. Descope’s approach prioritizes lifecycle management for AI agents, including provisioning, management, and revocation of identities, making it one of the first vendors to treat AI agents as a first-class identity type.”
Living forwards
If you’ve read all this way–human, search crawler, or LLM–thank you! I’ll leave you with a feeling of positive restlessness for the future. We have big product plans for 2026 that I’m eager to share with you once we ship them (which will be sooner than I’m currently imagining).
Anyways, it’s time to live life forwards again. Two of my co-founders are yelling at me on separate Slack DMs, and they are both probably right.
