Why We Backed Token Security: Securing Non-Human Identities for the Agentic AI Era

CISOs have spent decades building mature Identity and Access Management (IAM) programs for people. Yet in the background, a far larger and less governed population has quietly emerged: non-human identities (NHIs) which include service accounts, APIs, cloud workloads, ephemeral processes, and increasingly, autonomous AI agents.

Today, NHIs outnumber humans by staggering ratios, more than 45:1 in some enterprises. Unlike employees, these identities often lack ownership, lifecycle controls, or even basic visibility. Many are created dynamically in code, persist far beyond their intended use, and accumulate excessive privileges. The result is privilege sprawl, blind spots, and unmanaged risk.

Attackers have already capitalized. Compromised NHIs have been at the center of high-profile breaches from the OAuth attack against Microsoft by Midnight Blizzard, to incidents at Snowflake, Uber, and Okta. With agentic AI accelerating, the attack surface is only multiplying.

Why SVCI Focused on NHI Security

At SVCI, we dedicate each quarter to a structured investment cycle with broad market scans, deep diligence, and community-driven debate. While most cycles are opportunistic, NHIs represented such a critical and urgent problem that we ran a thematic diligence track.

Over 4–6 weeks, we reviewed more than a dozen startups across machine identity security, workload enforcement, and service mesh integration. Through founder interviews, guided demos, blind customer references, and technical deep-dives, one company stood apart: Token Security.

What convinced us wasn’t just market timing. It was alignment:

• Problem fit: Every CISO we spoke with reported gaps in NHI governance.
• Technical depth: Token Security’s contextual discovery and lifecycle-first approach directly address operational realities.
• Founder-market fit: A team deeply attuned to the pain of ephemeral, machine-native identities.

What Makes Token Security Different

Token Security treats NHIs as first-class citizens in the security stack, not an afterthought.

• Contextual Discovery: Rather than producing flat inventories, Token maps each identity back to its origin (i.e., source code, IaC templates) and entitlements across environments. This creates an identity risk graph that ties every machine account to its owner and purpose.
• Lifecycle Governance: Ownership, least-privilege enforcement, and automated deprovisioning ensure NHIs don’t persist unchecked.
• Machine-Native Detection: Behavioral analytics tuned for NHIs flag misuse patterns IAM tools miss, such as anomalous API calls or secrets abuse.
• Automated Response: Integrated with SIEM, SOAR, and XDR, Token Security enables machine-speed response without slowing down operations.

The Token Security platform spans discovery, lifecycle management, compliance reporting, posture management, remediation, and detection and response, which is all highlighted in its unique NHI Risk Graph. This breadth makes NHI security not just a safeguard, but the control layer for safe, scalable AI adoption.

Future-Proofing for Agentic AI

The stakes are about to rise dramatically. As enterprises deploy autonomous AI agents that are capable of spinning up infrastructure, executing tasks, and interacting with external systems, the need for rigorous governance becomes existential. Without it, AI adoption risks devolving into uncontrolled sprawl with serious security risks.

As AI innovation expands the attack surface, we are glad to see Token Security well positioned to extend their capabilities to help us reduce our risk. Token Security is among the few platforms natively equipped to govern AI agents alongside NHIs. By discovering, securing, and contextualizing these new classes of identities, Token Security provides the guardrails for responsible enterprise AI.

Our Decision to Invest in Token Security

Ultimately, our conviction rested on three things:

1. Criticality of the problem: Every enterprise faces it, and the risk is only compounding.
2. Practicality of the solution: Token Security meets CISOs where they are, integrating seamlessly with existing workflows.
3. Executional fit: A team with the expertise, early traction, and clarity of vision to lead a new category.

For us, Token Security isn’t chasing hype. It is solving a structural security gap that every enterprise must address. That’s why we believe Token Security will define the next decade of Agentic AI and non-human identity security.

To read the full report on why SVCI chose to invest in Token Security, click here.

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