Opal Security, an AI-native access governance platform, announced a $23 million funding round and the appointment of five senior leaders as the company accelerates growth and expands its platform for governing human, service, and AI agent identities.
The funding round was led by Greylock and Battery Ventures, with participation from Cambium Capital. The investment brings Opal’s total funding to $59 million.
The announcement builds on the arrival of CEO Howard Ting in December 2025. Ting brings leadership experience from cybersecurity and enterprise software companies including Cyberhaven, Nutanix, Palo Alto Networks, and Redis. As part of the company’s expansion, Opal promoted Alex Pien to Chief Technology Officer and added four additional executives to its leadership team:
- Sameer Mehta, Chief Product Officer, formerly of Veza
- Alex Pien, Chief Technology Officer, formerly of Meta
- John Clark, Vice President of Field Engineering, formerly of Cisco
- Michael Kwon, Vice President of Marketing, formerly of Clumio
- Christine Ooley, Head of Product and Solutions Marketing, formerly of Salesforce
More than 60% of Opal’s workforce has joined since the beginning of 2026, reflecting increased hiring across engineering, product development, and go-to-market functions.
The company said the rapid adoption of AI agents is creating new identity security challenges for enterprises. Organizations increasingly need to monitor and govern access for AI agents alongside human users and service accounts, ensuring that permissions are appropriately scoped and risks are minimized.
Opal’s platform incorporates AI agents into the same access governance framework used for other identities, including access reviews, ownership controls, policy management, and auditing. Earlier this year, the company launched a platform designed to provide visibility, governance, and enforcement of access controls through Paladin, its AI-powered engine that evaluates access requests and escalates only those requiring human review.
Customers, including Databricks, Notion, Cloudflare, Scale AI, CoreWeave, SpaceXAI, and Superhuman, use Opal’s platform to modernize identity management and access governance. The company said organizations are increasingly adopting just-in-time access controls, automated reviews, and rapid permission revocation as AI adoption grows.
Opal noted that Databricks processes 86,000 just-in-time access requests through its platform, while Mercari governs more than 5,000 Okta entitlements through automated review processes.
The company said the new funding will support continued product development and expansion as enterprises seek ways to govern access across a growing mix of human, machine, and AI identities.
KEY QUOTES:
“Great operators don’t chase markets—they pick the biggest problem and the best team to solve it with. Sameer, John, Michael, and Christine have each built category-defining products, and they came to Opal for the same reason: governing access across every identity—human, service, and AI agent—is becoming one of the defining problems in security. The new funding gives us the resources to go solve it.”
Howard Ting, CEO, Opal Security
“I’ve spent my career in identity and security, and it’s rare to see a platform this aligned with where the market is heading in the era of AI. Access used to be a one-time decision. Today it’s a continuous, high-volume problem across humans, services, and AI agents at machine speed. The real problem is control. Where most solutions stop at visibility or governance, what excites me about Opal is that they’re defining the control plane for identity, enforcing access decisions in real time across every system.”
Sameer Mehta, Chief Product Officer, Opal Security
