WideField Security announced that Cisco Investments has joined its Series A funding round as the company expands its identity security platform to address the growing risks associated with autonomous AI agents. The company also confirmed that John Hurley, Chief Revenue Officer of Optiv, has joined its board of directors, effective immediately.
The announcement comes as enterprises increasingly adopt AI-driven tools and automation, creating new challenges in identity security. WideField is positioning its platform to provide comprehensive visibility across human and non-human identities, including AI agents that operate with delegated authority and often without direct oversight from IT teams.
The company’s platform is designed to secure the entire identity lifecycle. It provides visibility into credentials and privileges when identities are at rest, monitors authentication and access events while identities are in motion, and analyzes active sessions to detect threats when identities are in use. With its latest update, WideField has extended these capabilities to AI agents, enabling organizations to track and monitor their actions in real time.
This expansion addresses a growing gap in traditional identity security systems, which often focus primarily on authentication. According to the company, many recent breaches have occurred despite the use of tools such as single sign-on, privileged access management, and governance solutions. Attackers have increasingly exploited vulnerabilities through methods such as infostealers, attacker-in-the-middle kits, AI-assisted phishing, and stolen OAuth tokens.
WideField’s approach focuses on continuous monitoring beyond login. Its platform builds behavioral models by ingesting telemetry from users, devices, and applications, allowing it to detect anomalies such as token misuse, impossible travel scenarios, unauthorized permission usage, and data exfiltration patterns as they occur.
The rise of AI agents has intensified these challenges due to their non-deterministic behavior and broad access privileges. WideField aims to provide security teams with full visibility and control over both human and machine identities across their lifecycle.
Cisco Investments’ participation in the funding round underscores the growing importance of securing non-human identities and AI-driven systems as enterprises scale automation and agentic AI capabilities.
KEY QUOTES:
“I’ve spent my career working with companies on their most pressing security challenges, and identity is consistently at the center of those that matter most. WideField’s unique combination of visibility, real-time session monitoring, and now coverage for AI agents helps address gaps that every CISO I talk to has identified as a priority within their security framework. I’m honored and excited to join the board.”
John Hurley, Chief Revenue Officer, Optiv
“The rise of AI agents is reshaping the evolution of identity security, requiring an approach that focuses on the full lifecycle of how identities are created, authenticated, and used. We are excited to invest in WideField. This investment reinforces Cisco’s commitment to building a unified Identity Intelligence layer that secures the rapidly expanding frontier of non-human and agentic AI identities across the entire security lifecycle.”
Janey Hoe, Vice President, Cisco Investments
“Authentication was never the finish line, but that’s where most tools stop. AI agents operate continuously, with broad permissions. We built WideField to close that gap and give security teams control over every identity lifecycle, human or machine, from the moment credentials are provisioned.”
Abhay Kulkarni, Chief Executive Officer, WideField
“The pace of AI tools and automation adoption is not slowing down. WideField gave us the confidence to keep moving forward, because we can see and monitor the identities, human and non-human, interacting with our environment.”
John McLeod, Chief Information Security Officer, NOV
