Looking to broaden its identity security portfolio, CyberArk (NASDAQ: CYBR) on Tuesday announced it has acquired Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) vendor Zilla Security for $165 million in cash, plus a $10 million performance-based earn-out.
The deal marks CyberArk’s second major acquisition in recent months, following its $1.54 billion purchase of Venafi in 2024 and signals a push by the publicly traded firm to pursue unified, cloud-first approach for managing both human and machine identities.
Zilla Security, a venture-backed startup out of Boston, pitched AI-driven tools designed to automate labor-intensive processes such as user provisioning and compliance reviews — traditional pain points in legacy IGA systems. The company raised $17.6 million in early-stage funding.
In a note announcing the transaction, CyberArk said the plan is to fold these capabilities into its Identity Security Platform to market a single pane of glass for privilege management, lifecycle automation, and out-of-the-box integrations with popular SaaS and cloud applications.
This integration is being positioned as a must-have to shorten deployment timelines and cut administrative overhead for enterprise defenders struggling with the rapid expansion of SaaS apps and hybrid environments.
The company is betting that the addition of modern IGA capabilities will help tap into a widening market need: ensuring secure, compliant access for every user and application across sprawling hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
Last year, CyberArk shelled out $1.54 billion to acquire machine identity firm Venafi amidst plans to create an enterprise-scale unified platform for end-to-end machine identity security.
At the time, the company said the combination of Venafi’s cryptographic code signing, certificate lifecycle management, private PKI, and secrets management capabilities would drive plans to help organizations protect against machine identity misuse and compromise and to prevent outages.
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