Saviynt, a cybersecurity startup based in El Segundo, announced on Tuesday that it raised $700 million in series B growth equity capital. The fresh financing values the company at around $3 billion.
KKR’s funds led the financing round with additional participation from Sixth Street Growth, TenEleven and Carrick Capital Partners.
Saviynt’s core platform, the Saviynt Identity Cloud, sifts through every account connected to a secure business application and scans it for cybersecurity risks. The company’s artificial intelligence-powered software and identity security tools like it are becoming increasingly necessary in the arms race AI has created between bad actors and companies looking to protect their data.
“This is a defining moment for Saviynt and the industry,” Sachin Nayyar, the founder and chief executive of Saviynt, said in a statement. “The demand for secure, governed identity has never been greater, and this growth investment gives us the resources to meet it head-on.”
Large-scale companies often have employees who need permission from the information technology team to access sensitive accounts that hold valuable information. Identity security companies like Saviynt automate what can otherwise be a tedious process of individually approving or denying security requests.
Companies are increasingly onboarding AI-driven applications and Model Context Protocol servers – which connect generative AI models to internal databases or APIs – thereby increasing their risk of cybersecurity attacks. A Team8 cybersecurity survey from July found that 25% of chief information security officers reported an AI-powered cybersecurity attack in the last year, and 52% reported boosting their cybersecurity budget due, in part, to network attacks fueled by AI.
Identity governance companies like Saviynt have seen significant investor interest due to the urgency around AI. The sector raised $1.45 billion in venture funding globally, marking 2025 as its most financially fruitful year yet, according to PitchBook.
Saviynt itself has staked its claim on more than 20% of Fortune 100 companies. It opened a Dubai-based headquarters earlier in December to expand on its partnership with StarLink, one of the largest cybersecurity distributors in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Enterprises across the Middle East are adding thousands of new identities every month, yet many still rely on manual access reviews and fragmented tools,” said Todd Rotger, chief revenue officer at Saviynt, in a statement. “That gap is exactly where attackers thrive.”
The company’s decision-making algorithm uses a complex cocktail of determining factors to approve or deny access to sensitive company information.
It tracks and manages all digital identities, records activity during privileged sessions and grants hyperspecific permissions so users can only access exactly what they need and nothing more. It also continuously scans existing protocols and flags any account that has excessive permissions, is dormant and no longer requires access to privileged information, or was accidentally granted access to a private server.
While AI tools put companies at greater risk of cybersecurity attacks, they’re unlikely to stop using them. One KPMG report surveyed companies with $1 billion in revenue and found that 97% were investing in AI over the course of the year.
“They’ll be investing in AI, because how can you not?” Andrew Jones, the principal researcher for the Governance & Sustainability Center at The Conference Board, told the Business Journal in October. “Your competitors are, your industry peers are, and if you’re not doing it, you are taking a huge risk that you will not be a leader whether it’s with new products, new customers or new ways of working.”
The Conference Board published a report in October that found 99 of the surveyed companies disclosed a cybersecurity-focused AI-related risk in their annual filings, compared to just 15 in 2023.
“That’s sort of the nature of cybersecurity, that AI is going to change it at the same time that companies are going to deploy AI tools to try and protect themselves against all of that,” Jones said. “Sort of a strange cycle.”
Keerthi Vedantam
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