There’s something quietly poetic about consistency in a sector defined by constant chaos. Veza, which has built its reputation as the pioneer of access-based identity security, has once again been named to the Fortune Cyber 60 list for 2026 — its third consecutive year on the prestigious ranking of private cybersecurity companies shaping the industry’s future. The recognition, compiled with Lightspeed Venture Partners, filters through over 500 venture-backed contenders and celebrates those with a potent mix of growth, technical depth, enterprise traction, and overall market influence. Veza’s endurance on this list isn’t just a testament to clever branding; it signals a deep structural shift in how identity and access management are being reimagined for an AI-driven era.
At the core of Veza’s offering lies its Access Graph — a conceptual and technical backbone that translates permissions and entitlements into real-time, visualized intelligence about who (or what, in the case of machine and AI identities) can do what, and where. It sounds deceptively simple, but in practice, this model upends the traditional, reactive posture of identity governance by making “least privilege” more than just a policy checkbox — it becomes a living, continuously auditable reality. Tarun Thakur, the company’s CEO and co-founder, captures this succinctly: access is where identity risk becomes real. In other words, breaches, insider threats, and compliance failures all trace back, sooner or later, to who had access to what. And Veza’s architecture is designed to surface those truths before they turn into headlines.
The broader context for Veza’s recognition is worth noting. Identity security has moved from a niche subdomain into the gravitational center of enterprise defense strategies. As companies deploy generative AI and autonomous agents into production, they face a multiplying problem of permissions — thousands of machine identities, ephemeral tokens, and cross-cloud credentials that traditional IAM tools struggle to map. Veza’s cross-platform integration with Active Directory, Entra ID, AWS, Okta, Snowflake, Salesforce, GitHub, and more than 300 other enterprise systems gives it a data fabric view that aligns tightly with modern Zero Trust architectures and AI governance mandates. This positions Veza less as a competitor to old-guard IAM platforms and more as the connective tissue that modern enterprises now need to remain compliant and secure.
It’s also notable that Gartner has consistently highlighted Veza within the emerging Identity Visibility & Intelligence Platform (IVIP) category, essentially validating its thesis that understanding access relationships is the next frontier of identity-first security. This aligns neatly with Fortune’s focus this year on companies tackling the complex interplay of cloud security, AI safety, and human-machine identity convergence. In short, Veza is riding the identity wave it helped create.
For rivals like SailPoint, Saviynt, and even the traditional IAM modules embedded in platforms from Microsoft or CyberArk, Veza’s continuing prominence signals that the market is tilting toward access intelligence — not just access control. The subtle but important distinction is that visibility is now as strategic as enforcement. And as enterprises shift to hybrid and AI-driven environments, this “graph-first” approach might well become the new default.
Three consecutive years on the Cyber 60 list isn’t just a bragging right for Veza; it’s an indicator that the company’s framing of identity as an access intelligence problem has gone from contrarian to canonical. The next challenge will be scaling that philosophy across an ecosystem increasingly populated by AI agents — digital entities that operate, decide, and, crucially, access faster than humans ever could. Veza, it seems, is building the language through which those permissions will be understood.
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