Insider Brief
- Opal Security has raised $23 million in new funding led by Greylock and Battery Ventures, with participation from Cambium Capital, bringing its total to $59 million, alongside five senior leadership hires including Sameer Mehta as Chief Product Officer from Veza.
- The company’s AI-native access governance platform manages identity security across human, service, and AI agent credentials, with customers including Databricks, Notion, Cloudflare, and Scale AI — Databricks alone runs 86,000 just-in-time access requests through the platform.
- CEO Howard Ting, who joined in December 2025, is accelerating growth as enterprises struggle to secure AI agents that are deployed faster than security teams can monitor them, with more than 60% of Opal’s team having joined since the start of 2026.
PRESS RELEASE — Opal Security, the AI-native access governance platform for every identity, has announced $23 million in new funding alongside five senior leadership appointments, including Chief Product Officer Sameer Mehta, who joins from identity security platform Veza, where he built products across non-human identity and access intelligence. The new funding was led by Greylock and Battery Ventures, with outside participation from Cambium Capital, and brings Opal’s total funding to $59 million.
CEO Howard Ting, who arrived in December 2025, is a veteran of leading cybersecurity and enterprise software companies including Cyberhaven, Nutanix, Palo Alto Networks, and Redis. Among his first moves was promoting Alex Pien to Chief Technology Officer, anchoring the engineering organization as Opal scales. The new executive appointments include:
- Sameer Mehta, Chief Product Officer, former Veza
- Alex Pien, Chief Technology Officer, former Meta
- John Clark, Vice President of Field Engineering, former Cisco
- Michael Kwon, Vice President of Marketing, former Clumio
- Christine Ooley, Head of Product and Solutions Marketing, former Salesforce
More than 60% of Opal’s team has joined since the start of 2026, with hiring accelerating across engineering, product, and go-to-market. The growth tracks a shift in the market: AI agents are reshaping enterprise access, deployed faster than security teams can track them and often leveraging the standing, over-scoped credentials of users. Teams now need to see every agent alongside their human and service identities, scope each one to the task, and contain the blast radius when something breaks.
Opal brings agents into the same access graph, reviews, ownership, and policy-as-code as every other identity. In March, Opal launched the industry’s first platform to see, encode, and enforce access governance, anchored by Paladin, an AI engine that evaluates requests and escalates only what needs a human.
Companies like Databricks, Notion, Cloudflare, Scale AI, CoreWeave, SpaceXAI, and Superhuman rely on Opal to modernize their identity stack as they adopt AI agents. Databricks runs 86,000 just-in-time access requests through Opal, and Mercari governs over 5,000 Okta entitlements through automated reviews. The pattern: just-in-time by default, access reviews that surface risk instead of rubber stamps, and permissions revoked the moment they are not needed. AI agents need the same controls, only at far greater scale and speed.
“Great operators don’t chase markets — they pick the biggest problem and the best team to solve it with,” said Howard Ting, CEO of Opal Security. “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.”
At Veza, Sameer led products in non-human identity security, access intelligence, and lifecycle management; earlier he ran a global product organization at Citrix, with prior roles at Symantec and Sun Microsystems Research Labs. John brings field and solutions engineering leadership from Cisco, where he led solutions engineering for AI security, with earlier roles at Valtix (acquired by Cisco), ThousandEyes, and Riverbed. Michael brings go-to-market and demand gen leadership from Clumio, Redis, and SignalFx. Christine comes from Salesforce and Box, most recently leading portfolio marketing for MuleSoft’s API and agentic products.
“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,” said Sameer Mehta, Chief Product Officer at Opal Security. “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.”
About Opal Security
Opal has now raised $59 million from Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Box Group, SVCI, and Cambium Capital, and was recently named to Notable Capital’s Rising in Cyber 2026 list of the 30 most promising private cybersecurity startups, as selected by 150 leading CISOs. Opal is the AI-native access platform that gives security teams real-time visibility, expressive policy-as-code, and direct control over every identity, from employees to service accounts to AI agents. As environments grow more dynamic and autonomous, Opal becomes a self-improving system that ensures resilience and the ability to move faster without increasing risk.
Read the full conversation with Sameer on the Opal blog. For more information, please visit opal.dev.
Contacts
Media Contact: christine@opal.dev
Opal Security
Featured image: Credit: Opal Security
