# Co-founder and CEO, ZITADEL

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

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## Bio

Florian Forster co-founded ZITADEL in 2019 with a group of colleagues from a Swiss public-sector employer, aiming at a gap they kept hitting: a developer-focused identity platform that supports both self-hosting and real multi-tenancy rather than treating one as an afterthought.

Profile built from public company and project records.

## Where their work shows up

ZITADEL is event-sourced, which is an unusual choice for identity and a deliberate one: every change to a user, a role, or a policy is an immutable event, so the audit trail is the data model rather than a log written next to it. For anyone who has had to reconstruct who granted what and when during an incident, that distinction is the whole argument. See the [ZITADEL profile](https://startwithidentity.com/vendors/open-source/zitadel/) and [what is IGA](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-iga/) for why audit trails carry weight.