Ravi Madabhushi is cofounder and chief technology officer of Scalekit, where he builds identity infrastructure for AI agents operating across enterprise applications. His focus is delegated agent authorization: establishing which agent is acting, whose authority it carries, what it can access, and when its permissions expire.
Before founding Scalekit with Satya Devarakonda, Madabhushi built identity, authentication, and authorization infrastructure at Freshworks. His early Scalekit writing examined enterprise SAML implementation; his subsequent work applies enterprise identity principles to agents that retrieve information and act across multiple services. In September 2025, Scalekit launched its authentication stack for AI agents and announced $5.5 million in seed funding. Madabhushi described agents as collaborators that need delegated access and user consent in his public launch announcement.
An operational incident clarified the stakes: agent traffic repeatedly updated a user-activity timestamp, increasing database writes and producing recurring latency spikes. Batching resolved the immediate problem, but the incident exposed how assumptions built for human-speed software fail when agents become the primary actors. His AI Engineer World’s Fair talk extends that observation to authentication, authorization, and accountability.
- Principal-versus-actor separation: An agent and the person it represents are different identities. Both must remain explicit and linked, so shared API keys and service accounts cannot obscure who authorized an action.
- Task-scoped, time-limited permissions: Broad OAuth scopes cannot reliably constrain probabilistic software. Madabhushi advocates short-lived credentials, contextual restrictions, just-in-time approval, and least-privilege agent access.
- Scoped MCP: Scalekit’s role-specific virtual MCP servers expose only the tools required for an agent’s assigned task while using user-specific sessions to isolate credentials.
- Agent tool observability: Per-call monitoring links actions to users, connectors, and credentials, helping operators distinguish infrastructure failures from external-service errors.
- Cross App Access: Scalekit’s participation in Okta’s ecosystem connects enterprise-managed identity with policy-controlled authorization for the downstream tools agents use.
