Okta, one of the largest companies in the digital identity management market, is buying the startup Permiso Security. Officially - no price disclosed. Unofficially - around 200 million dollars (just under 175 million euros), almost entirely in cash, according to a source familiar with the deal. When Okta's spokesperson was asked whether the figure was accurate, they did not dispute it. In this industry, that counts as confirmation.

Permiso came out of stealth in 2022 and to date has raised only around 29 million dollars, of which 18.5 million came in a Series A in April 2024 led by Altimeter Capital. That round valued the firm at roughly 80 million dollars. Two years later it is selling for 2.5 times more. The founders are Paul Nguyen and Jason Martin, former executives at FireEye - people who built entire careers on catching attackers who walk in with stolen credentials.

That is also the whole logic of the acquisition. Until now, identity firms made money on checking the entrance - are you who you claim to be. Now the centre of gravity is shifting to what happens after the door is open: what the user does, what the application does, and what the AI agent you gave system access to does. Permiso does exactly that - it tracks suspicious activity in cloud environments after access has been granted, and lately it monitors autonomous agents as well.

In April the startup also released a platform called SandyClaw, designed to analyse AI agents' skills in an isolated environment and detect malicious behaviour before they are put to work. Read that sentence again in the context of this week: isolated environments for testing AI models are exactly the places from which, over the past ten days, models got out twice when they should not have.

„Permiso will extend Okta's security fabric with proven capabilities for detecting and responding to identity threats,” said Eli Kahn, Okta's chief product officer. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal 2027.

What is worth noticing is not the price, but what justifies it. The market is no longer expanding because of new users - the people on this planet have already been counted. It is expanding because every company is adding software that acts on its own, and every such piece of software demands its own identity, its own permissions and its own supervision. Buying Permiso is a bet that the machines will outnumber the employees - and that somebody will need to watch all of them.