Okta

Sapiom Raises $35M Series A for AI Agent Infrastructure

Sapiom, an AI infrastructure company for building and operating autonomous agents, announced a $35 million Series A funding round led by Dragonfly with participation from Accel, Gradient, Coinbase Ventures, Operator Collective, Formus Capital, and VanEck Ventures and continued support from Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Array Ventures. The round follows a $15 million seed six months earlier and brings total funding to $50 million. Alongside the financing Sapiom launched Sapiom Router, Sapiom Agent Studio, and Sapiom Runtime. The company says it has processed over 270 million transactions and supports more than 100,000 agent runs per day.

Nvidia-led OSAA launches SAFE working group

Nvidia has spearheaded the Open Secure AI Alliance (OSAA), an industry group that has grown to over 120 companies in its first week and created the Shared AI Findings Exchange (SAFE) working group. SAFE has published proposals for open comment, with the Linux Foundation managing the proposals. Members convened at Black Hat in Las Vegas while contributing open-source tools and components — examples include Nvidia’s Garak LLM vulnerability scanner, Okta’s agent identity work, Red Hat’s agent governance efforts, and Amazon’s Strands Agents and Cedar authorization language. The membership list includes large enterprise names such as Adobe, BlackRock, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Visa and Hugging Face; notable nonparticipants so far include Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. The alliance and its rapid activity follow an industry debate about U.S. policy toward Chinese open-weight models and an open letter urging U.S. support for open-source AI.

Okta to acquire AI security startup Permiso for ~$200M

Okta has agreed to acquire AI identity security startup Permiso Security in a deal valued at just under $200 million, structured as an almost all-cash transaction, according to a source. Okta did not disclose terms publicly; the acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of Okta's fiscal 2027, subject to customary conditions. Permiso, founded by former FireEye executives Paul Nguyen and Jason Martin and emerged from stealth in 2022, builds tools to detect suspicious activity and monitor AI agents and machine identities. The startup has raised roughly $29 million to date, including an $18.5 million Series A in April 2024 led by Altimeter Capital. Okta said the deal will extend its identity threat detection and response capabilities to better secure AI agents and non-human identities.