According to Fortune, ServiceNow announced this week it is acquiring the identity and access management platform Veza. The deal is reportedly valued at over $1 billion, a premium on Veza’s last private valuation of $808 million from April. ServiceNow President Amit Zavery stated the move directly addresses customer demand, especially from chief information security officers, for a way to control and track data access for both people and AI agents. The acquisition will boost ServiceNow’s cybersecurity business, which already generates over $1 billion in annual sales. Veza, founded in 2020, counts major firms like Blackstone and Expedia as customers and will be integrated into ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower product.
Why This AI Security Move Matters
Here’s the thing: identity management used to be a relatively straightforward, if tedious, human resources problem. You gave employees access based on their role. But AI agents completely break that model. An AI isn’t a static employee with one job title. It’s a tool that can be used by anyone for almost anything. As Zavery pointed out, the same AI agent might need wildly different permissions if it’s working for a junior analyst versus the head of HR. That’s a nightmare for traditional security systems.
So ServiceNow isn’t just buying a cybersecurity company. It’s buying a specific capability it sees as the foundational lock for the AI era. Veza’s patented Access Graph technology, which maps relationships between humans, AI, devices, and data in real-time, is the real prize. It’s the kind of granular, dynamic control you need when your “employees” are software bots that can act at machine speed. Without this, deploying AI at scale is a massive governance and compliance risk. Basically, you can’t have autonomous agents without autonomous oversight.
The Bigger Trend at Play
This acquisition is a huge signal flare for where enterprise tech is heading. We’re moving from the phase of “Look what my AI can do!” to the inevitable, “Okay, but how do we stop it from doing something stupid or dangerous?” The official announcement frames it as expanding a security portfolio, but it’s really about enabling the next phase of AI adoption. ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower needs a powerful enforcement engine, and Veza provides it.
Think about it. Every major platform company that wants to be the hub for enterprise AI—ServiceNow, Microsoft, Salesforce—needs to solve this trust problem. They can’t just sell powerful tools and hope customers figure out the guardrails. This buy is ServiceNow saying they want to own that security layer within their ecosystem. It’s a defensive play, sure, but also a massive offensive one. If they can promise safer, governable AI, that’s a compelling reason for companies to run their AI ops on ServiceNow and not somewhere else.
What Happens Next?
The real test will be in the integration. ServiceNow had partnerships with other providers, but Zavery said they found Veza “the most advanced, especially in the AI native world.” Now they have to make it seamless. If they can bake Veza’s capabilities deeply into their platform, it becomes a powerful differentiator. If it feels bolted on, the billion-dollar bet looks shaky.
And let’s not forget the sheer scale of the check they wrote. Paying over a billion for a company that was last valued at $808 million just months ago, as noted in their Series D announcement, shows serious urgency. It tells you ServiceNow believes this problem is critical *now*, not in a few years. The race to secure the AI workforce is officially on, and the price of entry just got a lot higher. Other players in the identity space are going to be looking in the mirror, wondering if they’re “AI-native” enough. My guess? This is the first of several big consolidations in this space. The era of AI security has arrived, and it’s expensive.
