# Co-founder and CEO, Teleport

Source: https://startwithidentity.com/experts/ev-kontsevoy/
Last updated: 2026-09-20
License: content by Start with Identity. Cite the source URL.

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## Bio

Ev Kontsevoy co-founded Teleport, then called Gravitational, in 2015 with Taylor Wakefield and Sasha Klizhentas, starting from the problem of managing access to Kubernetes clusters. He had previously co-founded Mailgun, which was acquired by Rackspace.

Profile built from public company and press records.

## Where their work shows up

Teleport made the argument that infrastructure access is an identity problem, not a network one: no shared SSH keys, no standing database passwords, just short-lived certificates issued against an identity and recorded end to end. That framing pulled [privileged access](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-pam/) toward engineers and CI pipelines rather than administrators, and it overlaps directly with [machine identity](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-machine-identity/). See the [Teleport profile](https://startwithidentity.com/vendors/pam/teleport/) and the [best PAM for DevOps](https://startwithidentity.com/rankings/best-pam-for-devops/) ranking.