#acquisition

SWI's Identity Consolidation Report 2026 reads 63 identity acquisitions against the ownership of 297 tracked vendors. Identity companies make most of the deals; security, IT and data platforms pay almost all of the money. Five AI-agent identity vendors were bought in 87 days, and 67% of the market is still independent.

Workday signed a definitive agreement to buy C1.ai, the access governance vendor that renamed itself from ConductorOne in April. Price undisclosed, close expected by January 31, 2027. The plan is to tie access for people and AI agents to Workday's HR lifecycle.

Quantum computing company IonQ agreed to buy Elisity in an all-stock deal worth up to $1.3 billion, including a $150 million earnout. Elisity enforces least-privilege network policy per identity, covering users, devices, workloads and AI agents. Close is expected in Q4 2026.

Okta signed a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security, reportedly for just under 200 million dollars in an almost all-cash deal. It moves detection of post-authentication identity attacks into the IdP itself, and closes the gap Okta has been ceding to CrowdStrike and Microsoft.

A data-security company is paying roughly 1 billion dollars, about 700 million of it in cash, for a four-year-old non-human identity startup. The price says more about where the category is heading than any product announcement this year.

Two weeks from announcement to close. Entro brings discovery and lifecycle management for more than 1,200 kinds of secret, token, and certificate into SailPoint's Agentic Fabric, aimed at the machine identities that outnumber staff by an order of magnitude.

Reported at 250 to 300 million dollars, the deal gives 1Password just-in-time privileged access across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Snowflake, and Databricks, and takes it into territory owned by PAM vendors.

A two-year-old company with 27 people and a 7 million dollar seed round sold for roughly 110 million. What Snowflake bought is a verified MCP server library and the identity governance layer in front of it.

Astrix goes into Duo, Splunk, and Cisco Identity Intelligence. The pitch is extending zero-trust principles to an agentic workforce, which in practice means governing the OAuth tokens and service accounts nobody owns.

Price undisclosed, reported as tens of millions for a company founded in 2025. Fabrix supplies the identity knowledge graph and decisioning; Silverfort supplies the enforcement point that already sits in front of legacy systems.

Announced in December 2025 and closed on 2 March 2026, substantially in cash. Veza, valued at 808 million dollars in its Series D, now supplies the permission graph behind ServiceNow's AI Control Tower.

The largest deal in security industry history closed on 11 February 2026. CyberArk shareholders took 45 dollars cash plus 2.2005 Palo Alto shares per ordinary share, and privileged access management now sits inside a network security platform.

The deal that opened 2026's consolidation wave. SGNL brings CAEP-based continuous access evaluation and just-in-time authorization to a Falcon identity business already past 435 million dollars in annual recurring revenue.