Delinea Completes Acquisition of StrongDM in Push to Secure AI Agents
Delinea, a provider of solutions for securing human and machine identities through centralised authorisation, has completed its acquisition of StrongDM, the universal access management company purpose-built for modern engineering, DevOps and AI-driven environments. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The deal comes at a time when enterprises are rapidly scaling agentic AI and automation. Privileged access is increasingly required by non-human identities that operate autonomously across hybrid and cloud-native environments, introducing risks that static, credential-based models were never designed to govern. By combining Delinea’s strength in enterprise privileged access management (PAM) with StrongDM’s just-in-time runtime authorisation, organisations can discover every identity, reduce risk where it matters and enforce least-privilege access at the moment of action, making Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) achievable in practice.
Art Gilliland, Chief Executive Officer at Delinea, said the acquisition addresses one of the most pressing challenges in modern cybersecurity. “Standing and hard-coded privileges remain one of the largest sources of risk in modern, AI-driven environments,” he explained. “Security teams have historically had to balance between strong identity governance policies and maintaining developer and operational speed. By bringing StrongDM’s runtime authorisation capabilities to the Delinea Platform, we’re empowering rapid and secure AI adoption for our customers.”
The combined Delinea and StrongDM platform brings together enterprise PAM and runtime authorisation into a unified identity security control plane powered by Delinea Iris AI, enabling real-time policy evaluation and governance of privileged actions taken by both human and non-human identities across modern infrastructure.
Together, the two companies will deliver discovery and governance of privileged access for every human and non-human identity across infrastructure, databases, containers and CI/CD pipelines. The platform also reduces exposure to credential theft, phishing and software supply chain attacks by minimising persistent credentials. In addition, it provides real-time governance of privileged actions taken by AI agents and other non-human identities through centralised visibility, auditability and enforcement.
Industry analysts have welcomed the move. Emanuel Figueroa, Senior Research Analyst at IDC, noted that the rise of agentic AI and non-human identities is accelerating operational workflows to machine speed, exposing the limits of static privilege models. “By incorporating StrongDM’s JIT runtime capabilities into the Delinea Platform, organisations can extend Zero Trust to the precise moment of action and advance toward ZSP across both traditional and cloud-native environments,” he said.
Raghu Valipireddy, SVP and Chief Information Security Officer at Axos Financial, offered a practitioner’s perspective. “I’m genuinely excited about the possibilities of a unified platform,” he said. “Delinea has done an excellent job securing privileged access across traditional infrastructure for nearly a decade at Axos, while StrongDM solved just-in-time access in innovative ways for modern database and cloud environments.” Valipireddy added that when Delinea articulated a vision to bring these capabilities together, it immediately resonated with how Axos operates and where the company is headed. He said the combined platform would significantly strengthen its security posture by enabling continuous discovery, governance and real-time enforcement of least-privilege access across critical systems and data, supporting its AI initiatives and accelerating its move towards ZSP in alignment with business priorities.
With the acquisition, Delinea establishes identity as the control plane for modern security, helping to ensure every privileged action taken by a human or machine identity is evaluated and authorised in real time. The company says the move will enable organisations to eliminate standing privilege across AI-driven environments.