Palo Alto Networks in Talks to Buy Israel's Clutch Security for About $500 Million

If it goes ahead, the deal would be the fifth acquisition Palo Alto Networks has announced this year, according to the report. Chief executive Nikesh Arora has been buying companies to strengthen the cybersecurity group's defences against threats created by AI. No agreement has been announced.

The price would be a large return on a small amount of capital. Clutch has raised $28.5 million in total, through an $8.5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2024 and a $20 million Series A led by SignalFire in January 2025, TechCrunch reported at the time. It also shows where security spending is moving. Each AI agent an enterprise deploys needs its own credentials to reach data and applications, and those credentials are harder to track than human employees' log-ins.

Clutch works on what the industry calls non-human identities: the API keys, tokens, secrets and service accounts that software uses to authenticate with other systems. Its platform connects to nearly 60 infrastructure services, applications and identity providers to find these credentials, assess their risk and manage them over their lifecycle, according to TechCrunch.

The company was founded in Tel Aviv in October 2023 by chief executive Ofir Har-Chen, who previously worked in cybersecurity for Israeli government and private organisations, and by Sagi Haas and Tal Kimhi, both formerly of Axonius. When it raised its Series A, Har-Chen told TechCrunch that "AI agents are now being rapidly adopted in the enterprise, replacing manual tasks done by humans."

Clutch competes in a crowded field of machine-identity security companies that includes Astrix Security, Oasis, Silverfort, Token Security and CyberArk, which Palo Alto Networks agreed to acquire last year. A purchase of Clutch would add a specialist in AI agent credentials to that identity business.