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22/06/2026 10:21 am
TL;DR: Rising in Cyber 2026, selected by 150 CISOs and senior security executives and backed by more than $6.9 billion in combined fundraising, highlights how AI agents, identity and access management, and application defence are converging in enterprise security, according to Orca Security and Notable Capital. The signal is that identity governance is no longer a narrow IAM issue; it is becoming central to cloud, AI, and operational risk decisions.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Orca Security: Orca Security named to Rising in Cyber 2026 for the third consecutive year
By the numbers:
- The 2026 honorees were named alongside the release of the Rising in Cyber 2026 Report, produced in collaboration with Morgan Stanley.
- The 30 private cybersecurity companies recognized in Rising in Cyber 2026 collectively raised over $6.9 billion, according to PitchBook.
- The list is selected through voting by 150 active CISOs and senior security executives.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams respond to the convergence of AI security and IAM?
A: They should treat AI security, cloud security, and IAM as one governance problem when identities can reach the same workloads.
Q: Why does agentless cloud visibility not fully solve identity governance?
A: Because visibility shows what exists, not who is accountable for it or whether the access should still exist.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about AI-powered security agents?
A: They often assume that security tooling inside the control plane is automatically safe because it is defensive.
Practitioner guidance
- Map shared identity paths across cloud and AI tooling Inventory where human admins, service accounts, AI features, and security agents touch the same cloud resources.
- Tie AI security controls to entitlement ownership For every AI-enabled workflow, assign a human owner for the underlying access, the expected action scope, and the review cadence.
- Use market signals to re-sequence IAM priorities If your programme still treats IAM, cloud security, and AI governance as separate roadmaps, collapse the planning view into one cross-functional backlog.
What's in the full analysis
Orca Security's full announcement covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The specific Rising in Cyber methodology, including how the 150 CISO and senior security executive votes were collected.
- The report's market mapping across AI agents, identity and access management, security operations, and application defence.
- The AI-powered cloud security capabilities Orca cites, including real-time AI activity detection and enhanced runtime protection.
- The partnership context with AWS, Oracle, and Zscaler that the announcement says supports cloud and AI scaling.
👉 Read Orca Security's analysis of Rising in Cyber 2026 and AI security →
Rising in Cyber 2026: what it means for IAM and AI security?
Explore further
22/06/2026 11:14 am
Market recognition is now a proxy for identity convergence. The fact that AI, identity and access management, security operations, and application defence are being judged in the same market cohort shows where enterprise security buying is moving. Those categories used to be separated by operating model and budget owner; now they are increasingly evaluated together because the access paths are shared. Practitioners should treat this as a signal that identity governance is becoming a cross-platform control plane, not a standalone IAM workstream.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
- Only 19.6% of security professionals express strong confidence in their organisation's ability to securely manage non-human workload identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own governance when identity, cloud, and AI security overlap?
A: Accountability should sit with the team that can change the entitlement and explain the business purpose of the access, not only with the team that operates the platform. In many organisations that means IAM, cloud security, and AI owners need a shared model for access review and risk acceptance rather than separate sign-off chains.
👉 Read our full editorial: Rising in Cyber 2026 signals where identity security is heading
