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Welcome back! Dealmakers apparently did not get much of a break over the Thanksgiving weekend, as a flurry of recent merger announcements showed. In just the last day, The Information broke the news that Marvell Technology was buying photonics startup Celestial for billions of dollars and Anthropic was making its first outright acquisition, for coding tools startup Bun. And last week, we reported ServiceNow was buying Veza, a five-year-old startup whose software helps companies see which of their employees and AI agents have access to customer data. ServiceNow confirmed the deal Tuesday, without giving the price. Our reporter, Katie Roof, has learned, however, that the $170 billion-market cap ServiceNow is paying between $1 billion and $1.5 billion for Veza. At the median, the price represents a 50% premium from Veza’s private valuation of $808 million in March. It’s a nice return for investors such as Norwest, True Ventures and Accel. Veza is at least ServiceNow’s sixth acquisition this year, including its $2.85 billion agreement to buy Moveworks, a startup that automates IT help desk responses. Other software providers are likely to copy its Veza acquisition. Veza had multiple interested buyers circling the company, said people with knowledge of the discussions. A deal with Veza comes as ServiceNow is trying to stand out in an increasingly crowded market for AI agents. Everyone from Microsoft to AI-native startups such as OpenAI and Sierra are pitching companies on similar AI agent products. ServiceNow, whose software resolves companies’ finance, sales and HR issues, launched agents last year to automate processes such as resolving an IT help desk ticket. ServiceNow can now tout its ability to safely manage identities, particularly agents. For instance, when an AI agent is resetting the password of a company’s employee, Veza’s software can help the company’s cybersecurity staff stay on top of what the agent is doing and make sure it’s not a security threat. “What Veza does is opens up the ability for any AI-related workflow, but also any human identities, machine identities, as well as AI agents in one centralized place,” said Amit Zavery, president and chief product officer at ServiceNow. Zavery acknowledged that customers are at risk of getting confused by the barrage of similar sounding AI products from software vendors. But he told us that he talks to lots of C-suite executives who are worried about blind spots in internal AI usage–how AI is being used, who’s using it and how to manage the systems. He believes adding security tools to ServiceNow is a big differentiator as it gives leaders the confidence to expand their AI projects. At least for now. Companies including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Google, SAP, Snowflake, which are all selling different types of agents for automating tasks, could be on the lookout for startups similar to Veza. So could the traditional cybersecurity companies like Crowdstrike, as firms seek to control new vulnerabilities the agents have introduced, bankers have said. There’s no shortage of new startups working on the newest front of identity security. These include Token Security, Astrix Security and Clutch Security. As for ServiceNow, the company could be back in the M&A mix before long. While Zavery said there’s “no specific plans on acquisitions,” ServiceNow is still seeing opportunities in IT and security, customer relationship management and database capabilities. Bankers are likely to keep working the holidays. —Aaron Holmes and Katie Roof contributed to this report. | 
