Delinea, a San Francisco company that sells privileged access management (PAM) software, signed a definitive agreement to acquire StrongDM, an access management startup built for engineering teams, DevOps and AI-driven systems. The deal was announced on January 15, 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Delinea said it would combine its PAM platform with StrongDM's just-in-time runtime authorization, which checks each privileged action as it happens rather than granting standing access in advance. The companies said customers would be able to adopt the combined product without replacing their existing PAM systems.
The acquisition was subject to regulatory review and other customary conditions and was expected to close in the first quarter of 2026. Delinea announced on March 5, 2026 that it had completed the deal. Piper Sandler advised Delinea.
What StrongDM built
StrongDM was founded in 2015. It describes itself as a universal access management company and calls its design an "Identity Firewall". The platform evaluates identity, context and policy before it allows or blocks each privileged operation across infrastructure, applications and cloud environments, so security teams see individual actions rather than only the initial login.
Its users are largely developers. BankInfoSecurity reported that the product is known for command-line tools, just-in-time access and short-lived credentials, which are injected at the moment of use and revoked afterwards. Co-founder and chief technology officer Justin McCarthy told the publication that StrongDM's infrastructure-as-code module had been downloaded and used more than 12.3 million times.
Tim Prendergast has been chief executive since August 2021. He previously sold the cloud security company Evident.io to Palo Alto Networks in 2018 for $292.9 million and then spent about 15 months as Palo Alto's chief cloud officer, according to BankInfoSecurity, which put StrongDM's headcount at 186.
“Access models designed for static infrastructure and human users simply don’t work in continuous cloud and AI-driven environments.”
The funding
StrongDM raised $96 million in total, according to its own announcement of a $34 million Series C in May 2024. Anchor Capital led that round. Capital One Ventures, Cisco Investments, Frontline Ventures and Singtel Innov8 joined as new investors, and existing backers GV, Sequoia Capital and True Ventures also took part.
At the time, StrongDM said it would use the money to expand into Europe, the Middle East and Africa and into Asia-Pacific, and to open an engineering centre in Poland. BankInfoSecurity gave a higher total of $110 million for the company's funding.
Why Delinea is buying
Delinea's strengths lie in on-premises infrastructure, credential vaulting, legacy systems and Active Directory, used mainly by IT administrators who manage servers, firewalls and domain controllers. BankInfoSecurity reported that the company had identified gaps in cloud-native and Kubernetes environments, where StrongDM already provided just-in-time access to short-lived resources.
AI agents are a large part of the reasoning. Delinea said non-human identities now outnumber human users and need access to be governed in real time. Agents need narrow access that lasts only for a task, which static password vaults handle poorly. "Agents work now, which means agents need access," McCarthy told BankInfoSecurity.
Delinea chief executive Art Gilliland said stolen or lost credentials remain the leading cause of breaches. He told BankInfoSecurity that StrongDM had been "super effective" at winning adoption among developers, and that Delinea would stay focused on privileged access rather than build a broad security portfolio.
Prendergast described the deal as a way to deliver runtime authorization at enterprise scale, with policy enforcement that stays out of the way of developers and operators. Stephen Davis, chief information security officer at Hubbell Incorporated, was quoted in the announcement welcoming a single platform for IT teams, developers and AI agents.
A busy market for identity security
The deal is one of several moves to bring machine and AI-agent identities under privileged access controls. BankInfoSecurity compared Delinea's narrow focus with Palo Alto Networks' proposed $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk, which would fold identity into a much wider security platform.
Delinea said the combined product would offer one control plane for privileged access policy, authorization and audit across on-premises, cloud and SaaS environments. It would also support a gradual move toward zero standing privilege, in which no account holds permanent administrative rights.
For StrongDM's investors, the sale came less than two years after the Series C. Neither company said what the price was or how much of the consideration was paid in cash. Delinea's statement on completion in March did not name any StrongDM executives or describe their roles in the combined business.
