Canadian cybersecurity giant 1Password has acquired Israeli-founded cyber startup Apono in a deal estimated by Calcalist at $250 million to $300 million, marking 1Password’s first acquisition in Israel and one of the sharper Israeli cyber exits of the AI era.

The companies did not disclose the exact purchase price, but the strategy here is clear, 1Password is no longer trying to be known only as the company that stores passwords. It wants to become the system that decides who, or what, gets access inside a company, for what purpose, and for how long.

Apono, founded in 2022 by CEO Rom Carmel and CTO Ofir Stein, built its name around a fast-growing problem in enterprise security, permanent permissions. In many companies, employees, developers, contractors, automated systems and now AI agents often hold access long after they actually need it. That creates a huge opening for attackers. Apono’s platform flips that model, giving users and systems temporary access only when needed and automatically removing it when the task is finished.

As companies race to deploy AI agents inside sensitive business systems, those agents increasingly need access to cloud infrastructure, databases, internal tools, customer records and code. The old security model was built around humans logging in. The new one has to account for machines and AI tools acting on behalf of humans, often across several systems at once.

Apono’s technology is designed for exactly that world. Its platform manages access across cloud and enterprise environments including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Snowflake and Databricks, and integrates with more than 200 business tools such as Slack, Jira, PagerDuty and GitHub. The company says its system can evaluate what an AI agent claims it is trying to do, compare that to what it actually does, and narrow or revoke access if the behavior drifts outside the approved task.

In 1Password’s own words, the goal is to move beyond simply protecting credentials and into governing runtime access, who gets in, what they can touch, why they need it, and when that access expires. Apono CEO Rom Carmel described the core problem bluntly: “Standing access is the quiet liability inside almost every company.”

All 80 Apono employees are expected to join 1Password, including roughly 50 based in Israel, and 1Password plans to expand its Israeli operation by hiring more staff. For Israeli tech, that matters. The acquisition lands at a time when global cyber buyers are looking hard at Israeli security startups not just for classic network defense, but for the next wave of AI-era identity protection.

Apono had raised more than $54 million before the sale, including a $34 million Series B round led by USVP with participation from investors including 33N Ventures, Swisscom Ventures, Vertex Ventures and others. Its customers and references have included major enterprise names such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Monday.com, Bloomreach and Jasper.