Okta Inc. said today it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security Inc., a startup whose software hunts for attackers abusing identities across cloud accounts, software-as-a-service applications and, more recently, artificial intelligence agents.

No price was announced. A person with knowledge of the deal put it at just under $200 million, nearly all cash, in a report by TechCrunch. An Okta spokesperson did not dispute the number. Closing is due before the end of October, within Okta’s fiscal third quarter. Guidance issued May 27 does not change.

Permiso dates to 2020 and sells out of Palo Alto, California. Founders Jason Martin and Paul Nguyen both came out of FireEye Inc., and the company started selling openly two years later. Its product watches identities while they work. It ingests activity from identity providers, cloud accounts, software-as-a-service applications and infrastructure-as-code tools, then flags behavior that does not match what a given account, key or agent normally does with its access. Okta put the detection breadth at more than 2,500 research-driven signals across over 70 identity partners.

Much of Permiso’s early name recognition came from P0 Labs, its research arm, and the tools it gives away. CloudGrappler came first, in 2024. It hunts for known threat actor activity inside Amazon Web Services and Azure accounts. Three more landed that November 2024, taking the P0 Labs open-source count to 10. Last October brought P0LR Espresso, which flattens cloud logs from rival providers into a single format so analysts are not rewriting queries for every platform.

Permiso moved into agentic security in September, extending its platform to cover what it calls AI users, AI builders and AI agents. Those capabilities were expanded this year with agent and session discovery, runtime attribution linking activity back to a specific identity, detection of over-privileged agents, kill switches and SandyClaw, a sandbox that detonates agent skills and prompts to see how they behave before they run in production. Autodesk Inc. deployed the agent tooling across its products, workforce and cloud infrastructure in May.

Other customers include Nutanix Inc., Coupa Software Inc. and ACV Auctions Inc. Permiso had raised $28.5 million, including an $18.5 million Series A in April 2024 led by Altimeter Capital Management LP with participation from Point72 Ventures LLC.

“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,” said Ely Kahn, chief product officer at Okta. “Permiso will extend Okta’s identity security fabric with proven identity threat detection and response capabilities.”

The deal is Okta’s second security purchase in under a year, following privileged access management startup Axiom Security Ltd. in August, and it fills an obvious gap in the identity security fabric strategy Okta has been assembling. Okta already sells Identity Threat Protection and posture management tools, but its runtime detection has leaned on sessions and identities inside Okta’s own control plane. Permiso’s detections run across the cloud accounts, keys and agents that sit outside it.

Nguyen said combining Permiso’s technology and expertise with Okta’s platform is what makes “comprehensive identity threat protection possible at this scale.”

Image: Okta