Proofpoint, a cybersecurity and compliance company, announced its acquisition of Acuvity, an AI enterprise security and governance pioneer, to strengthen its platform with AI-native visibility, governance, and runtime protection for AI and agent-driven workflows. This strategic move aims to enable enterprises to confidently adopt generative AI while maintaining security, compliance, and trust.
As generative AI rapidly transforms work processes, organizations are increasingly deploying AI copilots, autonomous agents, and model-connected applications across various functions, from software development and customer support to finance and legal. While these technologies offer significant productivity and innovation benefits, they also introduce new risks such as shadow AI, sensitive data exposure, intellectual property loss, regulatory violations, and AI-specific attacks like prompt injection and model manipulation.
The acquisition expands Proofpoint’s human- and agent-centric security platform to offer comprehensive visibility, governance, and control within the agentic workspace, where human and AI agents collaborate on business-critical workflows. Acuvity’s AI-native security capabilities are designed to allow confident generative AI adoption without compromising security, compliance, or trust.
Ryan Kalember, Chief Strategy Officer at Proofpoint, stated, “AI agents are becoming active participants in the enterprise, accessing data, executing tasks and making decisions alongside people. Securing this new model of work requires understanding human intent, agentic behavior and risk in real time.” He added that the combined efforts of Proofpoint and Acuvity will empower organizations to confidently adopt AI tools and agents with the necessary governance, visibility, and control to manage risk. Kalember emphasized Proofpoint’s unique position to protect the agentic workspace end-to-end by securing humans, defending data, and governing AI through a unified platform.
Acuvity’s platform introduces new control points and detection models specifically built for the AI era. It provides comprehensive visibility and enforcement across all AI usage in the enterprise, covering endpoints, web browsers, and emerging AI infrastructure like Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and locally installed AI tools such as OpenClaw and Ollama. When combined with AI-powered detection models that interpret context and intent, Acuvity enables organizations to govern and secure interactions between users and external AI services, while also protecting custom AI models and applications developed or deployed internally.
With Acuvity’s AI security capabilities, Proofpoint aims to become the first unified platform to comprehensively secure every aspect of the agentic workspace. This acquisition is expected to reinforce Proofpoint’s leadership among CISOs and CIOs by providing an integrated portfolio that spans collaboration security to protect against human-centric threats, data security and governance to defend sensitive information, and AI security to govern enterprise AI usage and protect AI models and applications.
Satyam Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Acuvity, commented, “AI is fundamentally reshaping how work gets done and enterprises are overwhelmed by the pace of AI adoption and the complexity of securing it.” He further noted that in an AI-accelerated world, intelligence resides in interactions, decisions, and autonomous agents, necessitating a new approach to govern how AI operates in real time. Acuvity’s capabilities are anticipated to enhance Proofpoint’s offerings in securing how people and AI agents work, communicate, and interact with data, thereby enabling organizations to securely adopt AI.
Proofpoint, Inc., headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, is a global leader in human- and agent-centric cybersecurity, providing solutions for email, cloud, and collaboration tools. The company serves over 80 of the Fortune 100 and thousands of other organizations, focusing on threat prevention, data loss prevention, and building resilience across people and AI workflows. Acuvity, also based in Sunnyvale, California, is an AI security and governance platform specifically designed for autonomous AI, offering runtime inspection and enforcement across applications, agents, and MCP servers.
