Ev Kontsevoy
- Co-founded Teleport, formerly Gravitational, in 2015
- Replaced shared credentials for infrastructure access with short-lived certificates
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 toward engineers and CI pipelines rather than administrators, and it overlaps directly with machine identity. See the Teleport profile and the best PAM for DevOps ranking.
Related on Start with Identity
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Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol. A specification for communicating security-relevant session events, such as a credential change, a device falling out of
- GlossaryConditional Access
Policy-driven access decisions evaluated at sign-in time. Inputs include identity, device, location, risk signals, and application sensitivity. Microsoft Entra
- PodcastCyberArk
CyberArk's identity security interview show, launched as Trust Issues and renamed Security Matters. Silent since March 2026, after Palo Alto Networks' acquisiti
- GlossaryDevice Posture
The state of a device at the time of access: OS patch level, disk encryption status, EDR presence, jailbreak detection, certificate enrollment. Posture is an in
- PodcastKuppingerCole Analyst Chat
Weekly conversations between KuppingerCole analysts on identity architecture, governance, AI agents, and the market. Over 300 episodes since 2020.
- ExpertCo-Founder and CEO
Todd McKinnon co-founded Okta in 2009 with Frederic Kerrest after both came from Salesforce. Led the company through its 2017 IPO and the 2021 Auth0 acquisition