1Password is buying its way into the agentic enterprise.
The Toronto identity-security company said on Monday it has acquired Apono, an Israeli startup that decides, in real time, what every human, machine and AI agent is allowed to touch inside a company’s systems. Neither side disclosed a price; the Israeli outlet Calcalist reports the deal is worth $250m to $300m, which would make it 1Password’s first acquisition in Israel.
The logic is the runtime layer.
1Password built its name storing passwords and secrets, the credentials that prove who an identity is. Apono governs the next question: once that identity is inside, what can it actually do, and for how long? Its platform grants access only at the moment it is needed, scoped to the task, then revokes it automatically when the work is done, so there are no standing accounts and permissions lying around for attackers to exploit.
“Today’s identity systems govern the entry, but not the stay,” said 1Password CEO David Faugno.
What the Apono deal gives 1Password #
The timing is about AI agents.
As software starts acting on its own inside critical systems, the number of non-human identities is exploding, and few companies have a way to govern them. Apono’s answer is intent-based access control: an agent’s permissions are tied to the human who delegated the task, scoped to a declared intent, and narrowed or revoked the moment the agent’s behaviour drifts from what it was authorised to do.
The platform provisions access across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Snowflake and Databricks, and plugs into more than 200 enterprise tools including Slack, Jira and GitHub.
Apono was founded in 2022 by Rom Carmel and Ofir Stein, who had spent two decades in DevOps and cybersecurity, Carmel in the cyber unit of Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office. It had raised about $54m, most recently a $34m Series B in December 2025, and counts HPE, Jasper and Bloomreach as customers. All 80 staff, around 50 of them in Israel, are joining 1Password, which plans to keep hiring there.
The password manager is now an access-governance company #
For 1Password, valued at roughly $6.8bn with more than $400m in annual recurring revenue, this is the latest step away from being a password manager and toward being what it calls a single “control plane” for every identity. It paired the deal with a new product, Credential Broker, now in private beta, and is pitching the combination as one front door for humans, machines and agents. The bet is that “standing access,” permissions granted once and never taken back, becomes the defining security liability of the agentic era. It is also a crowded bet: 1Password is now competing on the same turf as fellow identity players such as CyberArk and Wiz, and a wave of startups, NewCore among them, racing to secure the workforce that isn’t human.
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