---
title: The next step for authentik
description: TL;DR authentik is a company now, and we’re hiring!
slug: 2022-11-02-the-next-step-for-authentik
authors:
    - name: Jens Langhammer
      title: CTO at Authentik Security Inc
      url: https://github.com/BeryJu
      image_url: https://github.com/BeryJu.png
tags:
    - announcement
hide_table_of_contents: false
---

TL;DR authentik is a company now, and we’re hiring!

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authentik has been primarily a hobby project for me. Ever since I started the project in 2018, it was mainly developed in my spare time. Over time, and as the project gathered more of a following and the community grew, more people started helping with feedback, suggestions, and also by contributing documentation, integrations guides, bug fixes and new features.

During that time, there were quite a few requests from people that wanted professional support and consultation. There’s also been a lot of cool ideas shared from both the community and myself. However, I didn’t have the time to work on them as I always had a fulltime job that authentik couldn’t (even with all the very generous GitHub sponsors, thank you all very much!) fully replace.

Which is why I’m very happy to announce the launch of Authentik Security, an open core company built around authentik. I will be leading the company as CTO, and we have incorporated as a [public benefit company](https://opencoreventures.notion.site/OCV-Public-Benefit-Company-OPBC-eccb31976fc6485e9e55ad786c062d35) so the open source project will always be maintained. This move will allow me to work on authentik full time and hire a team of engineers. We’ve been graciously funded by Open Core Ventures (https://opencoreventures.com/), who have been a joy to work with.

As part of this change, authentik will be re-licensed to MIT, which should even make it easier to adopt in your environment. Thanks to our most active contributors [@iamernie](https://github.com/iamernie), [@tigattack](https://github.com/tigattack), [@ikogan](https://github.com/ikogan), and [@JosephKav](https://github.com/JosephKav) for supporting the license change.

Now I know this might sound scary to some of you. I can assure you that there will be nothing negative coming out of this for the open source version.

The current version of authentik will stay open source and continue to be developed. We will add business-focused features like auditing and compliance to the source-available enterprise version over time. No existing features will be removed from the open source version with the intention of adding them to the enterprise version. Features might still be deprecated but they won’t show up on the enterprise version. Features from the enterprise version will regularly be open-sourced. In fact, a lot of resources will go into the open source version, so everyone can benefit from them.

Overall, very exciting times ahead. We will hire full time developers, copy-writers, designers, etc, all to make authentik better for everyone. Thanks to all of the authentik community and everyone that uses it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the upcoming changes!
