Published on: May 22, 2024
CyberArk, an identity security company based in Israel, is buying US cybersecurity firm Venafi for $1 billion in cash and $540 million in shares. CyberArk expects the deal to be finalized by the end of 2024 once all regulatory hurdles are cleared.
“This acquisition marks a pivotal milestone for CyberArk, enabling us to further our vision to secure every identity – human and machine – with the right level of privilege controls. By combining forces with Venafi, we are expanding our abilities to secure machine identities in a cloud-first, GenAI, post-quantum world,” Matt Cohen, CEO of CyberArk, explained.
The Israeli firm has made a name for itself by securing the servers of corporations against cyber threats, both external and internal. CyberArk specializes in protecting cyber “identities,” which are collections of information used to verify not only people and devices, but almost anything that needs to securely connect with an IT system, including APIs, algorithms, services, or even just snippets of code.
CyberArk says that with the explosion of cloud services, third-party users, and employee-supplied equipment, the number of “machine identities” now outnumbers “human identities” 40 to 1, which has dramatically increased the “attack surface,” or number of ways that malicious actors can gain unauthorized access to IT systems.
CyberArk has over 8,000 corporate clients, including half of the Fortune 500. It was founded in 1999, has over 3,000 employees, and is currently owned by private equity firm Thomas Bravo. It’s listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange and has a market capitalization of $10.4 billion as of May.
Venafi, on the other hand, develops cryptographic keys and digital certificates. Its flagship product, Control Plane, promises to standardize machine identity management for its enterprise clients, an offering that would appear to fit well with CyberArk’s mission. Venafi was founded in 2000 and is based in Salt Lake City, Utah.