Agents are going to be running wild. Every company we know is putting software agents to work: writing code, answering customers, reconciling invoices, moving data between systems. Most of them were created by someone who needed a job done, not by the security team.
That raises four plain questions. Who is this agent? What is it touching? What does it have access to? What is it allowed to do? Today most companies cannot answer any of them.
Identity was built for people
For thirty years, security has been organized around the human user. A person is hired, gets an account, gets access, and loses it when they leave. Every tool in the stack assumes that life cycle.
Machines never fit it. Service accounts, keys and tokens have piled up for years with no owner and no expiry, and they already outnumber employees many times over. Agents make the problem faster and stranger, because an agent does not just hold a credential. It decides what to do with it.
Built before it had a name
We backed Oasis Security because it was built for this problem before the problem had a name. It finds every non-human identity in a company, works out who owns it and what it can reach, and puts rules around it. Oasis did not pivot into that opportunity. It was already built for it.
In 2026 Cyera agreed to acquire Oasis for about one billion dollars, joining what a company's data is with who, or what, is reaching for it. We expect more combinations like it.
Why it gates everything else
A company cannot hand real work to agents it cannot govern. Until a security team can see every agent, tie it to an owner and limit what it can do, the most valuable uses of AI stay in pilot. Identity is the bottleneck.
That is why we treat this as infrastructure, not a feature. The companies that solve it will sit underneath every deployment of AI in the enterprise, the way identity providers sat underneath the move to the cloud.
What we look for
The same things we looked for when we sold security for a living. A product a security team can deploy in days and see value from in the first week. Founders who have built and sold in this market before. And customers who bring it up unprompted.
Security is where we come from. Agents are where it is going.
This note reflects the views of Inflection Ventures as of the date written. It is not investment advice or an offer to sell securities.