ServiceNow finance: ServiceNow, Inc. entered advanced talks to acquire identity security start-up Veza in a deal worth more than one billion dollars, according to multiple reports.
The move signaled a strategic push to close gaps in access governance as customers face fast-rising AI-powered cyber threats.
If completed, the deal would value five-year-old Veza at more than four times the capital it raised from investors.
It would also mark one of the largest security-focused purchases in the enterprise software sector this year, and an important test of how much buyers now pay for identity-centric platforms.
Why ServiceNow is betting big on Veza identity security
For years, ServiceNow focused on workflows, incident handling, and automation across IT, employee, and customer processes. As more clients adopted AI assistants and autonomous agents, they asked tougher questions about who and what had access to sensitive records and how these permissions changed over time across multiple clouds.
Veza emerged as a specialist in this problem, mapping data permissions across complex environments and revealing where access controls drifted from policy.
By bringing Veza into its portfolio, ServiceNow aimed to add deeper identity context to its existing security operations offerings and to strengthen its narrative around proactive risk reduction rather than only reactive incident response.
Did you know?
In some global banks, machine accounts already outnumber human user accounts by more than 10 to 1, creating silent access risks that many legacy tools do not detect.
How the Veza platform protects human and machine identities
Veza built a platform that tracks which users, applications, and AI agents can access specific datasets and what actions they can perform. It automatically assembles inventories of machine identities, such as service accounts and bots, and highlights credentials that look risky due to excessive privileges or long periods of inactivity.
Those insights matter because many high-profile breaches have involved credential abuse rather than novel malware.
Veza tools help teams discover accounts that violate least-privilege rules or belong to former employees and abandoned workloads.
Customers can then remove unused access, tighten rights for powerful roles, and document changes for auditors and regulators.
Inside recent ServiceNow acquisitions in AI and data
The Veza talks arrived months after ServiceNow closed a $2.85 billion purchase of Moveworks, an AI-powered productivity company focused on conversational interfaces and natural language understanding.
That transaction, the largest in ServiceNow's history, signaled a strong appetite for external innovation in intelligence and automation.
ServiceNow also acquired data management specialist Data.world to improve how customers organize and analyze information feeds that flow through the platform.
Together, these deals suggested a pattern in which ServiceNow sought best-in-class point solutions and then wrapped them in its workflow engine, rather than building every capability from scratch.
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Identity security market growth in the age of AI agents
Analysts expected the identity security sector to expand rapidly as digital systems added more automated agents and internet-connected services.
One research firm projected that identity-focused products would grow from around twenty-five point nine six billion dollars in revenue in 2025 to roughly forty-two point six one billion dollars in 2030.
A key driver is the rise of non-human accounts. Some industry studies estimate that machine identities now outnumber human identities by a ratio of about 82 to 1.
Each bot, script, and microservice carries keys or tokens that can be stolen, creating a vast attack surface that traditional perimeter tools were never designed to manage.
What a Veza deal could mean for customers and rivals
Customers of both companies would watch closely to see how fast Veza features appear natively inside the ServiceNow interface. Security and compliance leaders want a single place to understand incidents, workflows, and access rights.
Tight integration could help them move from discovery to remediation in a single, consistent environment. For rivals in cloud security, the deal would underscore how central identity has become to modern defense.
It could pressure other platform providers to deepen ties with independent identity vendors or to pursue their own acquisitions.
The presence of high-profile Veza clients, such as Blackstone Finance: Blackstone Inc., Workday Finance: Workday, Inc., Sallie Mae Finance: SLM Corporation, and Snowflake Finance: Snowflake Inc., would add further credibility to the combined offering.
Looking ahead, a successful Veza acquisition could reshape ServiceNow's positioning in enterprise security.
Instead of handling only tickets after breaches occur, the company could present a continuous control plane that links identity context, AI activity, and workflow automation.
If ServiceNow aligns product roadmaps, pricing, and partner ecosystems around that vision, it may not only harden defenses for its installed base but also influence how the broader market defines best practice for safeguarding both human and machine access in an era of pervasive AI.
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