Cisco confirmed reports that it has acquired Astrix Security in a move to bolster management and control of AI agents.

Peter Bailey, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Security Business Group, touted the acquisition in a blog post, specifically pointing to Astrix’s focus on “non-human identity (NHI).”

“Since its founding five years ago, Astrix Security has focused on securing the identities and credentials that power modern systems – API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens – the very credentials that AI agents are now using (and abusing) to gain access and execute work at scale,” Bailey wrote. “The addition of Astrix Security brings deep capability to discover and secure every AI agent and non-human identity (NHI), including excessive privileges and real-time threats, enabling organizations to adopt AI securely and at scale.”

Bailey noted Astrix’s discovering and governance for AI agent capabilities that provides a “map” of an organization’s agentic activity that can be checked against established policies to prevent compliance violations and reduce attack surfaces; and its ability to manage AI agent life cycles from provisioning to decommissioning. The exec also highlighted Astrix’s agentic threat detection and response capabilities that can weed out compromised credentials and “out-of-scope” agent actions, and centralized secret management across vaults and clouds.

Astrix will be integrated into Cisco Identity Intelligence, strengthening visibility and context across identities with the Cisco Security platform, with Bailey adding that there are plans to extend these services into Cisco’s zero-trust access offerings, including Cisco Secure Access and Duo Identity and Access Management.

We also intend to extend these capabilities into our zero trust access solutions, including Cisco Secure Access and Duo Identity and Access Management, helping organizations secure AI agents and non-human identities across a broad range of use cases. There was also a link to extending this extra visibility and intelligence into Cisco’s Splunk or other security information and event management (SIEM) platforms.

“Customers will be able to discover, authenticate, and authorize agentic identities, as well as detect and respond when they use Cisco Secure Access as well as Duo,” Bailey said of these updated features.

Financial terms of the deal were not released, but Bailey’s post did come a few weeks after The Information published a report that a deal was in the works and valued at up to $350 million.

Astrix was founded by Alon Jackson and Idan Gour – both alumni of Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence division – with a focus on inventories agents and more humdrum NHIs such as service accounts, authorization apps, and API keys, along with any model context protocol (MCP) servers that may exist on an enterprise’s network. From there, it gives users context behind its discoveries, such as access permissions, while also prioritizing remediation with automated risk scoring.

Headquartered in New York with a research and development center in Tel Aviv, Astrix has garnered $85 million in funding to date. This includes a $45 million Series B funding round in 2024, which included backing from Menlo Ventures through its Anthology Fund partnership with Anthropic, as well as investors including Workday Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and F2 Venture Capital. Workday is among its customers, as well as NetApp, Figma, HubSpot, Workato, and Boomi.

The Astrix deal comes less than a month after Cisco said it was acquiring AI observability firm Galileo Technologies. That deal is expected to augment Splunk's capabilities with real-time visibility and protection into the full agent development life cycle, safeguarding agentic AI to help ensure transparency and accuracy in network systems.