Code Story episode
S11 E12: The Agentic Auth Crisis: Why AI Agents Are Forcing SaaS to Shift from User Directories to Short-Lived Scoped Token Planes with Ravi Madabhushi, Co-Founder & CTO of ScaleKit
Aug 12, 2025 · Season 11 · Episode 12 · 25 min
Building authentication for all things - Users, APIs.. and agents
Ravi Madabhushi finds that all of the stops along his professional journey were accidental. He grew up in a tiny village in the south of India - so small, it would take you 10 minutes to sprint across it, end to end. His goals back then were common - get a job, get married, etc. - but after he moved to Bangalore post school, he got acquainted with startups... and was hooked. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He enjoys playing tennis, badminton, and squash. He got introduced to squash when he was playing tennis, it started raining, and they were forced inside to play "inside tennis"... IE squash.
Ravi and his team had a successful exit from their prior company, and decided to give startups another go. They wanted to solve the authentication problem for builders wanting to focus on their product - not building auth. What they found was a new arena in the world of AI, agents, and authentication of everything in between.
This is the creation story of ScaleKit.
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