Photo: Palo Alto Networks headquarters in Santa Clara, California / Namaste jinx, Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Palo Alto Networks is in talks to buy Israeli cybersecurity startup Clutch Security for about $500 million, Calcalist reported, citing The Information, which cited people familiar with the talks.
The talks are not signed and neither company has made an official announcement, according to the report.
Clutch, founded in late 2023, builds a platform that secures what the industry calls non-human identities: the API keys, service accounts, tokens, passwords and permissions that let software systems and AI agents talk to each other. As companies roll out more AI agents, the number of those digital identities and permissions keeps growing, and they have become a significant target for attackers.
The platform maps every digital identity across a company’s environment, flags excess or exposed permissions, manages their life cycle and detects suspicious activity. Clutch has also been expanding into securing AI agents specifically.
The company was founded by CEO Ofir Har-Chen, CTO Sagi Haas and R&D VP Tal Kimchi. It has raised about $28.5 million to date, per Calcalist: an $8.5 million seed round in 2024 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Merlin Ventures and private investors including Shlomo Kramer, Exabeam co-founder Nir Polak and HashiCorp co-founder Armon Dadgar, followed by a $20 million Series A in January 2025 led by SignalFire. Clutch operates out of Tel Aviv and the United States.
If completed at the reported price, the deal would mark a significant exit for the young company and its backers, and another Israeli acquisition for Palo Alto Networks, the Santa Clara-based cyber giant.
JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv
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