Okta, the identity management company, said on July 30, 2026 that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security, a Palo Alto startup that detects attacks carried out with stolen or misused identities across cloud accounts, SaaS applications and AI agents.
Okta did not disclose the terms. TechCrunch, citing a source with knowledge of the deal, reported that the purchase was valued at just under $200 million and structured almost entirely as cash. An Okta spokesperson did not dispute the figure but declined to discuss specifics. Okta said the transaction would not change the financial guidance it issued on May 27, 2026.
The deal was expected to close in the third quarter of Okta's fiscal year 2027, subject to customary conditions, and Okta later said it completed the acquisition on August 26, 2026. Permiso's technology and its threat research team, P0 Labs, are joining Okta.
What Permiso built
Permiso was founded in 2020 by Jason Martin and Paul Nguyen, both former FireEye executives, and came out of stealth in 2022. Its software focuses on what happens after a user or application has already been granted access: it collects activity from identity providers, cloud platforms, SaaS tools and infrastructure-as-code systems and flags behaviour that departs from normal access patterns.
According to Okta, the platform draws on more than 2,500 research-based detection signals across more than 70 identity partners. It is designed to spot overprivileged access, unused permissions, policy violations and anomalous activity in real time, covering human users, service accounts and other non-human identities.
In 2025 the company extended the product to AI users, builders and agents, adding agent discovery, detection of over-privileged agents and kill switches. In April 2026 it introduced SandyClaw, a sandbox that runs AI agent skills and prompts to look for malicious behaviour before they are deployed. P0 Labs has also released free open-source tools, including CloudGrappler and P0LR Espresso.
“We're thrilled to welcome Permiso to Okta as we help companies secure their agentic enterprises where humans, applications, service accounts, and AI agents work together.”
Why Okta is buying
Okta has historically focused on verifying users at the point of login. Its runtime detection has mostly covered sessions inside its own control plane, SiliconANGLE noted, while Permiso watches cloud accounts, keys and agents outside that boundary. Okta said the deal extends its reach into the security operations center.
The company listed four areas it plans to build on: identity threat detection that combines Okta's authentication signals with behavioural analytics; visibility into AI agents running locally, on SaaS platforms or in the cloud; the SandyClaw sandbox for catching AI supply chain attacks; and automated investigation and containment of compromised or misconfigured agents.
Okta tied the purchase to AI security risk, citing its own survey in which 58% of executives said they had experienced an AI-related security incident or near miss in the past year. Ely Kahn, Okta's chief product officer, said Permiso would extend the company's identity security fabric with identity threat detection and response capabilities and a threat research team.
The founders and the funding
Permiso raised about $28.5 million before the sale, according to SiliconANGLE; TechCrunch put the total at about $29 million. The largest round was an $18.5 million Series A in April 2024 led by Altimeter Capital, with Point72 Ventures participating. People familiar with that financing told TechCrunch it valued the company at about $80 million after the investment.
Neither company disclosed how many people work at Permiso. In a statement, co-founder Jason Martin said that joining a neutral identity provider would let the team's work reach far more organisations than it could on its own. Co-founder Paul Nguyen said the combination would help security teams see identity risks more clearly and respond faster.
Customers and a crowded market
Permiso's named customers include Autodesk, Nutanix, Coupa Software and ACV Auctions, according to Okta and SiliconANGLE. Autodesk deployed the company's AI agent tooling in May 2026, and its chief trust officer, Sebastian Goodwin, was quoted in Okta's announcement describing Permiso as part of Autodesk's cloud security strategy.
The deal was Okta's second security acquisition in less than a year, following its purchase of Axiom Security in August 2025. It came as identity vendors moved from checking credentials at sign-in toward continuously monitoring what people, applications and AI agents do once inside a network, and as competition to secure machine identities increased with wider use of AI agents in companies.
