The identity-security company SailPoint has completed its purchase of Entro Security, a deal aimed at one of the less visible but fast-growing problems in corporate computing: securing the digital identities that belong not to people, but to machines. SailPoint said on June 29 that it had closed the acquisition of the Tel Aviv-based firm, Yahoo Finance reported.
What SailPoint bought
Neither company officially disclosed the price. The Israeli business daily Calcalist and the trade outlet SecurityWeek reported the deal was worth around $200m, according to Calcalist, a figure the companies have not confirmed.
Entro specializes in what the industry calls "non-human identity" security. When people log in to work systems, they use a human identity, a username and password. But software also has to identify itself to other software, using things like API keys, tokens, digital certificates and service accounts, the credentials that let programs talk to each other automatically. Entro's technology finds and secures those credentials, covering more than 1,200 types of secrets, tokens and certificates, Yahoo Finance reported.
Why machine identities matter
The scale is the point. Inside a typical company, machine identities vastly outnumber human ones; Calcalist cited an industry estimate of roughly 45,000 non-human identities in an organization of about 1,000 employees, in its report. Yet those credentials have historically drawn far less security attention than employee accounts. A stolen API key or an over-privileged service account can give an attacker a quiet way into systems, and because software acts automatically, at machine speed, a compromised machine identity can do damage quickly.
That problem is growing sharper with the spread of AI "agents," software that acts on its own to carry out tasks. Each agent needs credentials to do its work, and each set of credentials is something to secure.
The strategy
For SailPoint, whose main business has been managing the access rights of human employees, Entro fills a gap on the machine side. The company framed the deal as part of its push into governing AI. Chief executive Mark McClain said the acquisition closes what he called "the AI governance gap," giving organizations "a unified control plane to govern human, machine and AI agent identities," Yahoo Finance reported. SailPoint said Entro complements its recently launched Agentic Fabric platform, which is designed to discover and secure autonomous AI agents and machine identities.
Why investors are watching
The deal is small next to the weekend's larger takeovers, but it sits on a theme drawing money and attention: as companies deploy more automated software and AI agents, the credentials those systems hold become a security frontier of their own. Entro had raised about $24m before the sale, including an $18m round led by Dell Technologies Capital, and counted Booking.com, SolarWinds and Elastic among its customers, Calcalist reported. Consolidation in identity security is likely to continue as established vendors race to cover the machine-and-agent layer rather than build it slowly from scratch.
