ServiceNow Inc. is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Veza Inc., a startup with an identity management platform of the same name.

The Information late Wednesday cited sources as saying that the deal could be worth more than $1 billion. That’s more than four times the amount of funding Veza has raised to date. The company, which closed its most recent financing round in April, counts Workday Inc., Salesforce Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund among its backers.

Veza’s identity management platform helps companies secure the accounts that employees use to access work applications. It spots unused accounts that should be deleted because they represent potential attack vectors. Additionally, Veza finds accounts that are in active use but have access to more sensitive systems than strictly necessary.

The company says its platform can also identify a range of other cybersecurity issues. Some enterprises implement a so-called separation of duties policy for important applications. That means responsibility over a workload is split among multiple employees.

For example, a company might entrust one staffer with managing a database’s contents and ask another to monitor the database for malicious changes. Veza can detect accounts that don’t adhere to an organization’s separation of duties policies.

According to the company, its platform lends itself to managing not only employee accounts but also machine identities. Those are accounts and integrations that applications use to interact with one another. The platform automatically creates an inventory of the machine identities in a company’s network.

ServiceNow offers a broad set of cybersecurity features as part of its platform. It can identify vulnerabilities in a company’s infrastructure, prioritize them based on the risk they pose and identify attempts by hackers to exploit them. However, it offers limited features for managing user accounts and machine identities. If the acquisition materializes, Veza’s technology could help ServiceNow address that gap.

The deal wouldn’t be the company’s first 10-figure startup acquisition. In March, ServiceNow inked a $2.85 billion deal to acquire Moveworks Inc., the developer of an artificial intelligence productivity platform for knowledge workers. The software automates tasks such as searching internal documents and processing help desk requests.

More recently, ServiceNow acquired a venture-backed data management startup called data.world Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The startup offers a platform that helps companies organize the records they use in AI and analytics projects. The platform includes cybersecurity controls that enable administrators to regulate which employee may access what business record. 

ServiceNow could reportedly announce the Veza acquisition as early as next week.

Photo: ServiceNow