Changelog.

Deepak's April 2026 essay on what's replacing legacy CIAM. Argues the heritage tier (Akamai, ForgeRock, IBM, Oracle) is being superseded by developer-first platforms, and why the next decade's identity stack looks different.

Twilio announced its acquisition of Stytch on October 30, 2025. The deal positions Twilio as a unified communications + identity platform and reshapes the developer CIAM competitive landscape.

Auth0 (Okta) brought Auth0 for AI Agents to general availability in October 2025, introducing native primitives for AI agent authentication, including OAuth 2.1, agent-vs-human token separation, and dynamic client registration. The first major CIAM to ship a complete agentic-identity surface.

Descope closed a $35M seed extension on September 30, 2025, bringing total funding to $88M. The capital extends runway as Descope competes head-on with Auth0, Stytch (Twilio), and Clerk on flow-based orchestration.

Clerk closed a $50M Series C in June 2025, bringing total funding to $134M. The round signals continued investor confidence in developer-first CIAM as a defensible category despite Auth0's incumbency and the rise of Stytch / Twilio.

Through 2024–2025, three of the four major enterprise heritage CIAM vendors rationalized their identity portfolios under unified brands: IBM Security Verify → IBM Verify, CyberArk Customer Identity → CyberArk Identity, Oracle IDCS → OCI IAM Identity Domains. Together with the ForgeRock+Ping merger and Akamai EoL, the heritage tier compressed materially.

Microsoft confirmed the Azure AD B2C retirement timeline: end-of-sale to new customers May 1, 2025; existing tenants retired March 15, 2026. All B2C customers must migrate to Entra External ID before that date.

Akamai formally announced End-of-Life plans for Identity Cloud on October 31, 2024, with feature freeze in effect since end of 2024 and complete shutdown set for December 31, 2027. Existing Janrain-lineage customers should be in active migration.

Apple released iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia on September 16, 2024 with a standalone Passwords app and full cross-device passkey sync via iCloud Keychain. Mainstream Apple-user passkey enrollment and recovery UX took a meaningful step forward.

Microsoft Entra External ID went generally available in September 2024 as the modern successor to Azure AD B2C. Azure AD B2C entered end-of-sale on May 1, 2025; existing tenants retire on March 15, 2026. Every B2C customer should be in active migration.

NIST finalized ML-KEM (Kyber, FIPS 203), ML-DSA (Dilithium, FIPS 204), and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+, FIPS 205) on August 13, 2024, the foundation of the post-quantum migration roadmap that will reshape TLS, signing, and long-lived auth artifacts over the next decade.

WorkOS announced its acquisition of Warrant on April 23, 2024. The deal brings Zanzibar-style fine-grained authorization into WorkOS's B2B-first identity platform, putting it in competition with AuthZed (SpiceDB), OpenFGA, and Permify.

Thoma Bravo closed its $2.3B acquisition of ForgeRock in August 2023 and combined it with Ping Identity (which Thoma Bravo took private in October 2022). The unified entity now operates under the Ping Identity brand with ForgeRock's product line being absorbed.