The latest news on OpenClaw, AI agents, and automation
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Cisco paid $400 million for Astrix Security, a Unit 8200-founded startup that maps and monitors non-human identities like API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens. The deal targets the security blind spot created by AI agents that operate with broad permissions across enterprise systems.
Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire Portkey, an AI Gateway startup processing trillions of tokens monthly, to build a centralized control plane for monitoring, routing, and securing autonomous AI agent traffic across the enterprise. The deal extends a $28B+ acquisition spree that now includes CyberArk, Chronosphere, and Koi.
Data security platform Cyera, valued at $9 billion after a $400 million Series F in January, has acquired two-year-old startup Ryft for an estimated $100 to $130 million. The deal brings AI-agent-optimized data lake technology into Cyera's platform as enterprises struggle to govern data access across autonomous multi-agent workflows.
Israeli cybersecurity unicorn Silverfort acquired one-year-old Fabrix Security for an estimated tens of millions of dollars, combining Fabrix's AI decisioning engine and identity knowledge graph with Silverfort's Runtime Access Protection to create what they call the first autonomous identity security platform for the agentic era.
SpaceX announced a deal giving it the right to buy Cursor, the AI coding platform built by Anysphere, for $60 billion later this year. The alternative: pay $10 billion for their joint work on coding and knowledge AI. Cursor has surpassed $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue with over 1 million daily active developers.
Canadian AI company Cohere is acquiring Germany's Aleph Alpha in a government-backed deal valuing the combined entity at approximately $20 billion. Schwarz Group, the parent company of Lidl, is investing $600 million to lead an upcoming Series E round. The combined company will operate dual headquarters in Toronto and Germany, targeting sovereign AI contracts across regulated European and North American markets.
Cyera, the $9 billion data security vendor, announced on April 23 that it has acquired Ryft, a New York and Tel Aviv-based secure data lake startup founded in 2024. The deal, Cyera's fourth acquisition in five years, adds an AI-agent-specific data lake to Cyera's platform and accelerates its push to build a unified control plane for enterprise AI agent data access. Cyera plans to triple revenue over the next year, targeting $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.
SpaceX has negotiated a deal giving it the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for joint development work. The deal comes as Cursor's valuation has surged 24x in roughly 12 months, from $2.5 billion to a potential $60 billion exit.
SoundHound AI is buying LivePerson in a deal valued at $250M total enterprise value, merging voice agentic AI with digital messaging to create an omnichannel conversational AI platform serving 25 of the Fortune 100 across 30+ countries.
Microsoft has quietly acquired Fintool, a San Francisco startup whose AI agents autonomously build DCF models in Excel and earnings presentations in PowerPoint. The deal brings vertical-specific agent intelligence into Microsoft 365, days after OpenAI made its own financial AI play with the Hiro Finance acqui-hire.
OpenAI acquired AI personal finance startup Hiro Finance in an acqui-hire announced April 13. Founder Ethan Bloch previously sold neobank Digit for roughly $230 million and built an OpenClaw autotrading agent called RoboBuffett. Hiro shuts down April 20 with all user data deleted by May 13.
The $14 billion robotics foundation model startup just bought an entire division from a NASDAQ-listed $5 billion enterprise. Skild AI's acquisition of Zebra Technologies' Robotics Automation business, including the Symmetry Fulfillment orchestration platform, gives a single company the full stack from robot learning to warehouse-scale fleet coordination.
Cisco is negotiating to buy Astrix Security for between $250 million and $350 million, making it the first major acquisition explicitly targeting the AI agent security market. Astrix's platform inventories non-human identities, including service accounts, OAuth tokens, API keys, and MCP servers, that AI agents use to authenticate into enterprise systems.
OpenAI has acquired Hiro Finance, a personal finance AI startup backed by Ribbit Capital and General Catalyst. Founder Ethan Bloch, who built an autonomous OpenClaw stock-trading agent called RoboBuffett and previously sold neobank Digit for over $200 million, joins OpenAI with roughly 10 employees to build AI financial tools. Hiro shuts down April 20.
Cisco is reportedly negotiating to buy Astrix Security, a Tel Aviv startup that discovers and secures deployed AI agents in enterprise networks, for $250 to $350 million. The deal would be Cisco's second AI agent security acquisition in two days, following its agreement to purchase Galileo Technologies.
Project44 acquired Chicago-based LunaPath.ai in an all-cash transaction on April 9, bringing AI-native logistics orchestration agents in-house. The deal lets Project44 coordinate specialized agents across supply chain workflows through its proprietary data graph, shifting the platform from intelligence to autonomous, real-time execution.
Cisco is buying Galileo Technologies, an AI observability startup with $68.1 million in total funding, to add real-time agent monitoring, hallucination detection, and guardrail enforcement to its Splunk platform. The deal marks Cisco's second agent-infrastructure acquisition this week, following its reported talks to acquire Astrix Security for identity governance.
LM Studio has acquired Locally AI, an app for running AI models locally on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Creator Adrien Grondin joins LM Studio to lead native cross-device AI experiences. The company says it plans to ship 'new ways to use your models and agents seamlessly across your own devices.'
Anthropic paid $400 million in stock for a stealth biotech startup with fewer than 10 employees, all former Genentech researchers. The team joins Anthropic's healthcare and life sciences division to build AI agents for drug discovery, clinical trial planning, and regulatory documentation. The acquisition comes the same week Anthropic cut off third-party agent platforms from Claude subscriptions.
Cybersecurity firm Wiz discovered an unsecured Moltbook database leaking personal messages, 6,000+ email addresses, and over one million user credentials. The breach predated Meta's March 10 acquisition and helps explain the aggressive new terms of service that followed days later.
CNET confirmed during GTC 2026 coverage that OpenAI acquired OpenClaw after it went viral, while Meta picked up its social spin-off Moltbook. The two largest AI companies now control the core infrastructure and social layer of the agentic internet.
IBM completed its acquisition of Confluent, the Apache Kafka-based data streaming platform used by 40% of the Fortune 500, for $11 billion. The deal integrates real-time data streaming directly into watsonx, IBM MQ, and IBM Z — positioning IBM to sell the data layer that enterprise AI agents need to function in production rather than on stale daily snapshots.
Meta has acquired Moltbook, the social platform credited with launching OpenClaw's viral explosion in January 2026, raising questions about what the acquisition means for the open-source agent ecosystem.