Cisco acquires AI security startup Astrix for $400 million
The Israeli startup, backed by Menlo Ventures and Anthropic, targets growing risks from non-human identities and autonomous AI agents.
Cisco announced on Monday the completion of its acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity company Astrix Security. Calcalist has learned that the final purchase price is approximately $400 million.
Astrix’s capabilities will be integrated into Cisco’s broader security platform, including Cisco Identity Intelligence and its Zero Trust applications such as Duo and Secure Access. The integration will enable Cisco to leverage its extensive visibility across networks and infrastructure to understand not only what an agent is, but how it behaves, and to feed that data into event management systems such as Splunk for faster detection and response.
Founded in 2021 by Alon Jackson and Idan Gour, both veterans of Israel’s elite Unit 8200, Astrix has positioned itself around what it describes as a critical blind spot in modern cybersecurity. Its platform is designed to give enterprises visibility into “non-human identities” - software agents, automated processes, and increasingly AI-driven tools - and to detect and remediate excessive or malicious access before it leads to breaches.
The company’s focus has gained traction as organizations accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence across their operations. AI agents, often granted broad permissions to interact with internal systems and external services, introduce new vulnerabilities that traditional identity and access management tools were not built to handle.
Astrix’s platform enables companies to connect third-party and in-house applications securely, while monitoring and controlling the permissions granted to non-human actors. The goal is to prevent supply chain attacks and data leaks, particularly those stemming from over-privileged or compromised machine identities.
In December 2024, Astrix announced a $45 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $85 million. The round was led by Menlo Ventures through its Anthology Fund, a partnership with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, and included investors such as Workday Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, CRV and F2 Venture Capital.
In a post, Peter Bailey, SVP and GM of Cisco's Security business, highlighted the rapid shift toward the use of “AI agents,” autonomous systems that operate independently within organizations. While these agents improve productivity, they also create a new and potentially dangerous attack surface. Currently, only about 24% of organizations are able to implement effective “guardrails” and real-time monitoring of agents’ activity, creating a critical security gap that Cisco aims to address.
Bailey noted that Astrix specializes in securing non-human identities, including API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens, the same tools AI agents rely on to access data and execute actions. The acquisition will allow Cisco to provide comprehensive visibility into agent activity across organizations, manage their lifecycle (from authorization to revocation), and detect threats in real time, such as the abuse of excessive privileges.
