ServiceNow’s buy of id administration platform Veza defined

ServiceNow announced earlier this week that it was acquiring Veza, a fast-growing cybersecurity software startup that makes what is known as an “identity and access management” platform for both humans and AI agents.

Amit Zavery, who serves as ServiceNow’s president, chief product officer, and chief operating officer, told Fortune that the acquisition will help ServiceNow provide something its customers had increasingly been demanding.

He said chief information security officers—which the company already served through products that helped them triage network alerts and deal with cybersecurity incidents—have been asking for a way to control and track the data that people and AI agents access. “We’ve been thinking about how we really help our customers solve those complicated problems [around managing AI agents] and strengthen their ability to deliver on AI plans while having security and governance built in,” he said.

Zavery said Veza will provide a boost to ServiceNow’s fast-growing cybersecurity offerings, which are currently generating more than $1 billion in annual sales for the SaaS giant..

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Veza, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif., was last valued at $808 million in a funding round in April and news reports suggested that ServiceNow paid more than $1 billion to buy the company.

Identity and access management is a system for keeping track of who is accessing digital systems and what data they have permission to access. Such systems have always been an important aspect of cybersecurity. They are a way to limit the kinds of information a hacker who has stolen someone’s credentials—or that a rogue employee—can access and potentially pilfer or damage.

But these systems have taken on heightened importance as more and more companies begin allowing AI agents to perform actions, from simply fetching information to conducting transactions. Identity and access management platforms let information security and audit teams track what AI agents are doing and set rules that limit the potential risks that AI agents can pose.

Prior to agreeing to buy Veza, ServiceNow had an integration with its product, but did not offer an access management solution of its own. “We were working with multiple providers, but we found Veza as probably the most advanced, especially in the AI native world,” Zavery said.

Founded in 2020, Veza says it helps secure millions of enterprise customers, including Blackstone, Wynn Resorts, and Expedia.

Zavery said that ServiceNow was particularly impressed with what Veza calls its “Access Graph” technology—a patented system that maps the relationships and access privileges across human, AI agent, devices, and data pools in real time.

“I think the combination of here’s what a human can do, what machines can do, as well as what AI agents can do, and bringing it into one platform so that you don’t have fragmentation of access privileges” is critical to allowing companies to deploy AI agents without taking on too much security risk, Zavery said.

He said that AI agents pose a particular challenge for access control because the same agent might need different network privileges depending on which employee the agent is working for and what task they are supposed to be handling. An AI agent querying an HR database, for instance, might be allowed access to sensitive salary data when working on behalf of a senior manager but only limited access to, say, basic employee benefit data, when working on behalf of a junior employee. And, in both cases, you might want to give the agent permission only to read from the database, while if it were working for someone from the HR department, it might need permission to write to the database as well.

Zavery said that Veza’s platform allows companies to write these kinds of complex access rules. He said that Veza’s capabilities would be integrated into ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower product, which is a platform for monitoring and governing AI agents that it launched earlier this year. The company has said it has been among its fastest growing offerings.