Cisco announced on June 18, 2026 that it intended to acquire WideField Security, a Sunnyvale, California startup that monitors human, machine and AI-agent identities after they log in. Financial terms were not disclosed.
WideField's technology will be built into Splunk, which Cisco owns, to strengthen its agentic security operations center. Cisco said it would help Splunk normalize and correlate identity, session and activity data from many sources, including Cisco Identity Intelligence, so that AI agents working for security teams can tell whether an action belongs to a legitimate session or a malicious one.
Cisco updated its announcement on July 31, 2026 to say the acquisition had been completed. Gunderson Dettmer advised WideField on the deal.
What WideField built
WideField was founded in 2023 by Abhay Kulkarni, who became chief executive, and Kartik Kumar, both formerly of Netskope. Its platform focuses on what happens after a user or service has authenticated, an area where attacks such as session hijacking and token theft can bypass login controls.
The software builds an inventory of human and non-human identities, maps their exposure across accounts and roles and flags gaps in identity hygiene. It also detects misconfigured authentication policies and weak login paths, watches live sessions for threats and uses AI-driven behavioral analytics, according to SecurityWeek. It works across cloud, SaaS and on-premises systems.
In March 2026 the company said it had extended the platform to autonomous AI agents, offering real-time session detection and response across AI agents, non-human identities and human users. One customer, John McLeod, chief information security officer of NOV, said in 2025 that WideField had given his team visibility into what happened after users and services authenticated.
“Identity, in today’s agentic AI era, is not just focused on who logged in but who, or what, took action and under which authority, which session, and with what blast radius.”
Why Cisco is buying
In a blog post announcing the deal, Kamal Hathi, senior vice president and general manager of Splunk, said AI agents, autonomous workloads and non-human identities operating at machine speed had created a new class of security risk. Beyond unauthorized access, he wrote, the problem includes authorized accounts taking unsafe actions in the wrong context before any human can respond.
Hathi said security teams need to protect agents from manipulation, make sure agents are known, accountable and limited to the access they need, and detect and respond to threats at machine speed. He said that requires data pipelines that correlate telemetry from endpoints, identity systems, networks and cloud services in a form AI systems can use.
Cisco also said WideField's technology would strengthen the Cisco Data Fabric with deeper identity and session information, including for uses outside security operations. The company presented the deal as part of an integrated trust layer for AI agents that builds on its recent acquisitions of Astrix Security and Galileo.
The founders and the funding
WideField raised an $11.3 million Series A in October 2025 led by Crosspoint Capital Partners, with participation from existing investor Engineering Capital and others. The company said it would use the money for product development and to expand sales.
Zach Siverston, a managing director at Crosspoint, said at the time that most identity security products stop at authentication, leaving companies exposed to attacks that happen afterwards, and that WideField's approach closed that gap.
In March 2026, WideField announced that Cisco Investments had joined the Series A. The amount of that investment was not disclosed. At the same time, John Hurley, chief revenue officer of Optiv, joined WideField's board.
Kulkarni said at the time of the Series A that identity compromise was the root cause of too many breaches and that the funding would help the company reduce breaches caused by it.
What happens next
Cisco did not say whether WideField would continue to sell its product on its own or how many of its employees would join Cisco. The original announcement listed the retention of WideField employees and the successful integration of its technology among the risks to the deal's expected benefits.
Cisco's post did not give an expected closing date when it was published. The July 31 update confirmed completion without adding financial terms.
