Cisco buys Astrix Security for a reported 400 million dollars
Astrix goes into Duo, Splunk, and Cisco Identity Intelligence. The pitch is extending zero-trust principles to an agentic workforce, which in practice means governing the OAuth tokens and service accounts nobody owns.
Cisco announced in early May 2026 that it intends to acquire Astrix Security, with the deal closing on 29 June. Calcalist reported the price at around 400 million dollars. Astrix was founded in 2021 by Alon Jackson and Idan Gour and had raised 45 million dollars in a Series B in late 2024. Its platform discovers and governs non-human identities: the API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens that applications and AI agents run on. It flags excessive privilege, manages lifecycle for agent access, and detects compromised credentials and unauthorised agent behaviour. Cisco plans to integrate it into Duo, Splunk, and Cisco Identity Intelligence.
Why it matters
The Astrix problem is unglamorous and universal. A third-party SaaS integration gets an OAuth grant during a trial, the person who approved it leaves, and two years later that token still reads the entire mail estate. Nobody owns it, no joiner-mover-leaver process touches it, and it survives every password reset and MFA rollout you run.
Cisco's angle is distribution rather than novelty. Splunk gives it the log estate, Duo gives it the enrolment footprint, and Identity Intelligence gives it a place to correlate. If your organisation already runs all three, this arrives as a feature rather than a purchase, which is exactly the pressure standalone non-human identity vendors are now under.
Astrix customers outside the Cisco estate should ask where standalone lands on the roadmap. Precedent from the acquisitions tracker is not encouraging.
Source: Cisco, price via SecurityWeek