Home / Founders / Alex Salazar
Salazar built the first authentication API for developers at Stormpath, sold it to Okta, and now runs Arcade.dev, which lets AI agents act in business systems under each user's own permissions.
Alex Salazar is co-founder and CEO of Arcade.dev, an AI agent runtime founded in February 2024 that handles user sign-in, permissions, and tool calls so agents can take real actions on a user's behalf.
Selling Stormpath to Okta
Before Arcade, Salazar co-founded and ran Stormpath, which built the first authentication API for developers, according to Arcade.dev. Okta bought Stormpath in 2017, and Salazar spent the next few years there building products as a vice president, TechCrunch reported. Arcade says he later served as a general manager at Okta.
Starting with a Site Reliability Agent
When he saw ChatGPT, Salazar decided his next company would build AI agents. He started Arcade with Sam Partee, a former Principal AI Engineer at Redis. In a company interview, he said the first idea was an agent that diagnosed problems on websites and mobile apps by checking servers, storage, Datadog, and the code base. To make it work, the team built a new way for language models to connect securely to other services, and people who knew AI well were more impressed by that layer than by the agent itself.
Learning from Andy Rachleff at Stanford
Salazar calls Andy Rachleff, the Benchmark co-founder who coined the term product-market fit, a longtime mentor and a former professor of his at Stanford. Arcade now says its team authored the MCP tool authorization specification and sits on steering committees for MCP security and governance.
