Opal Security, an AI-native access governance platform, has secured $23m in new funding and appointed five senior leaders as it moves to bring human, non-human, and agentic AI identities under a single governance framework.
The round was led by Greylock and Battery Ventures, with additional participation from Cambium Capital, lifting the company’s total capital raised to $59m. The investment arrives alongside a significant build-out of Opal’s executive bench, with the appointments spanning product, engineering, field operations, marketing, and solutions.
The most prominent hire is Sameer Mehta as chief product officer, joining from identity security platform Veza, where he led work across non-human identity and access intelligence. He is joined by Alex Pien, promoted internally to chief technology officer, who previously held a role at Meta; John Clark as vice president of field engineering, formerly of Cisco, where he led solutions engineering for AI security; Michael Kwon as vice president of marketing, previously at Clumio; and Christine Ooley as head of product and solutions marketing, who joins from Salesforce. More than 60% of the company’s current headcount has joined since the start of 2026, with growth concentrated in engineering, product, and go-to-market functions.
The company positions itself at the intersection of a structural shift in enterprise security. AI agents are being deployed across organisations at a pace that outstrips the ability of security teams to track them, and they frequently inherit over-scoped credentials from existing users. Opal’s platform brings these agents into the same access graph, policy-as-code framework, and review processes used for human and service identities. In March, the company launched what it describes as the industry’s first platform capable of seeing, encoding, and enforcing access governance across all identity types, anchored by an AI engine called Paladin that evaluates access requests and escalates only those requiring human review. Customers including Databricks, Notion, Cloudflare, Scale AI, CoreWeave, and Superhuman use the platform. Databricks processes 86,000 just-in-time access requests through Opal, while Mercari manages governance over 5,000 Okta entitlements via automated reviews.
CEO Howard Ting joined the business in December 2025, bringing a background that spans Cyberhaven, Nutanix, Palo Alto Networks, and Redis.
Opal Security CEO Howard Ting said, “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.”
Opal Security chief product officer Sameer Mehta said, “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.”
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