Keyfactor to buy UK's Cofide to give AI agents verified identities
What's the deal? Keyfactor has agreed to acquire CofideDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a UK-based identity platform that issues verified identities to software workloads and AI agents running across cloud environments. Financial terms were not disclosed, and Cofide's team and technology join Keyfactor immediately.
What does Cofide do? It gives each workload and AI agent a unique, short-lived verified identity, replacing static secrets with cryptographic proof of what a workload is. The platform is built on open standards including SPIFFE, OAuth, and OIDC, and unifies workload identity and access management across cloud platforms.
Why now? Automated systems inside enterprises now far outnumber employees, yet most are still secured with static credentials that can be copied or stolen — handing whoever holds them the same access as the system itself.
What's the endgame? Keyfactor plans to fold Cofide into its Trust Control Plane, giving security teams one system to govern non-human identities alongside the certificates and keys they already manage. The company sells certificate and key management to enterprises and government agencies, and raised more than $1 billion for machine identity and post-quantum trust earlier this month.
What they're saying: Chief executive officer Jordan Rackie said trust infrastructure "must evolve to keep pace" as AI agents and autonomous workloads become critical to operations. Cofide founder and chief executive Matthew Bates said "AI agents are proliferating faster than most organizations can secure them."
The signal: Vendors across the identity stack have spent the year defining what autonomous agents should be allowed to do and how their actions get attributed, with new tooling from CrowdStrike, SailPoint, Beyond Identity, Akamai, and Saviynt. Standards bodies are weighing in too, including a NIST concept paper on AI agent identity and authorization — putting non-human identity at the centre of enterprise security spending.
Read more: IDTechWire
