Zscaler, the Nasdaq-listed cloud security company, announced on 21 May 2026 that it intends to acquire Symmetry Systems, a data security startup that maps which identities can reach which data inside a company. Zscaler said the deal was expected to close in the coming days, subject to customary closing conditions.
Financial terms were not disclosed in Zscaler's announcement or in press coverage.
Zscaler plans to combine Symmetry's technology with its Zero Trust Exchange platform, which it runs from more than 200 data centres worldwide. The stated goal is to give security teams the visibility they need to write and enforce policies on how AI agents communicate with applications, data and other agents.
What Symmetry Systems built
Symmetry's main product is an access graph. It pulls in access logs from across an organisation, including software-as-a-service applications, public cloud services, data stores and AI systems, and uses AI to link those records into a single map of which human and non-human identities are using which data, and through which paths.
The company started with data security for hybrid clouds. When it raised its Series A in 2021, SecurityWeek reported that its DataGuard platform gave a unified view of data objects across all stores to help with security and compliance. By 2023 it was marketing an AI-powered data security posture management (DSPM) platform and building a natural-language interface on top of a large language model so that less technical staff could understand data risks.
“As enterprises rapidly adopt AI, the old playbook for governing access built around users and directories cannot scale to millions of AI agents.”
Why Zscaler is buying
Zscaler argues that the way companies have governed access, by putting employees into directory groups and mapping those groups to applications, breaks down with AI agents. Agents act on their own across many systems, use short-lived identities and inherited permissions, and are multiplying quickly, leaving blind spots over what data they touch and on whose behalf.
With Symmetry, Zscaler says customers will be able to see, for example, what triggered an agent that opened a customer record, which identity it used and which systems it reached, with the Zero Trust Exchange stepping in if the behaviour looks risky. Zscaler listed five uses: deploying agents with visibility into their access, building least-privilege policies from granted and actually used permissions, tracing data lineage through chains of sub-agents and tools, detecting and containing unusual agent behaviour in real time, and estimating the blast radius if an agent or identity is compromised.
Symmetry chief executive Mohit Tiwari said he expects the leading security platforms of the AI era to be those that govern how information moves between identities, and that models built around endpoints, applications or network perimeters work at the wrong layer. He said the two companies were building the information flow network for the age of AI.
The founders and the funding
Symmetry was founded by Tiwari, a former cybersecurity professor at the University of Texas, and Casen Hunger, one of his former students, according to SecurityWeek. It came out of stealth in August 2020 with $3 million in seed funding.
In June 2021 it raised a $15 million Series A led by Prefix Capital and ForgePoint Capital, with Accenture Ventures and several individual investors, including DocuSign founder Tom Gonser, taking part. In August 2023 it raised $17.7 million in an insider round from ForgePoint Capital, Prefix Capital, W11 Capital Management and The Syndicate Group, which SecurityWeek said took its total funding past $35 million.
Symmetry's headcount was not reported.
Part of a wider AI security push
The acquisition came alongside other AI security moves by Zscaler. IT Brief reported that the company also launched Project AI-Guardian, built on its AI Protect portfolio, under which systems integrators including Cognizant, EY, HCLTech, Infosys, TCS and Wipro will help clients find unauthorised AI use and map links between data, identities and AI assets.
Zscaler chairman and chief executive Jay Chaudhry said the access graph would be the visibility layer the Zero Trust Exchange uses to govern agent-to-application and agent-to-agent communication at scale.
