Snowflake buys Natoma for about 110 million dollars to govern agent access to data
A two-year-old company with 27 people and a 7 million dollar seed round sold for roughly 110 million. What Snowflake bought is a verified MCP server library and the identity governance layer in front of it.
Snowflake has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Natoma, an enterprise Model Context Protocol platform for AI agents. Snowflake's quarterly filing puts total consideration at roughly 110 million dollars, mostly in stock with the remainder cash. Natoma was founded in 2024, employs 27 people, and had raised a 7 million dollar seed round from Greylock and Index Ventures. Its identity governance and privileged access capabilities let Snowflake customers connect Cortex Agents, Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Code, and other AI platforms to enterprise systems through a verified library of MCP servers, with Natoma supplying the control and governance fabric for those connections rather than the connections alone.
Why it matters
This is a data platform buying identity, which is the same move Cyera later made with Oasis and the reason both are worth reading together. Agents are only useful when they can reach systems, and the moment they can, the access question stops being a data governance problem and becomes an authorization one.
The specific thing Natoma sells is a verified MCP server catalogue. That matters because the realistic failure mode of agentic deployments is not a clever exploit, it is an internal team pointing an agent at an unvetted MCP server with a broad token attached. A curated registry with governance in front is a boring, effective control.
For buyers this narrows an option: Natoma standalone is unlikely to stay a neutral cross-platform product. If you evaluated it outside the Snowflake estate, look at the alternatives in our AI agent identity ranking.
Source: Snowflake