1Password is one of the few established security companies to explicitly prioritize AI agents as a primary user class in their core product strategy. Their Extended Access Management (XAM) platform is designed to govern and audit how agents use credentials and secrets, treating them with the same level of policy enforcement as human employees.
For those building or using agents, 1Password is a critical piece of the security stack. It allows developers to vault the sensitive API keys and access tokens that agents require, while providing a runtime broker to handle these secrets safely. This prevents 'secret sprawl' where agentic workflows might otherwise rely on hard-coded or poorly managed credentials, and it ensures that every action an agent takes is logged and auditable within the same system used for human identity management.
1Password is a Toronto-based security company that spent its first decade as the quintessential indie success story. Founded in 2005 by Roustem Karimov, Dave Teare, Sara Teare, and Natalia Karimov, the firm was bootstrapped for fourteen years before raising a massive $200 million Series A in 2019. That capital injection marked a shift in focus. While the company still maintains a significant consumer base, its current trajectory is aimed at the enterprise identity and access management (IAM) market.
Historically, 1Password competed with other password managers like LastPass and Bitwarden. However, as the workplace shifted toward SaaS-heavy environments and remote work, the company moved up the stack. Its modern offering, Extended Access Management (XAM), addresses the reality that traditional Single Sign-On (SSO) only covers about 30% of the applications used in a typical business. The remaining 70%—which includes developer tools, marketing platforms, and emerging AI tools—creates a shadow IT risk that 1Password aims to neutralize through discovery and vaulting.
One of the company's strongest differentiators is its popularity among developers. 1Password has built a specific suite of tools including a command-line interface (CLI), SDKs, and SSH key signing. By integrating security into the terminal, they reduce the friction that usually leads developers to hard-code secrets into scripts or plain-text files. This focus on 'developer experience' allows security teams to enforce policies without breaking existing workflows.
This developer focus is the bridge to their current emphasis on AI agents. In the agentic ecosystem, a machine or model often needs the same credentials as a human—GitHub tokens, database keys, or API secrets—to perform tasks. 1Password is positioning its vaulting technology as the broker for these machine identities. If an agent needs to access a private repository, 1Password provides a way to govern and audit that specific action, ensuring that 'machine identity' is not just a secondary thought but a primary security pillar.
Today, 1Password serves over 180,000 businesses, including a significant portion of the Fortune 100. They compete on two fronts. On one side are the traditional password managers. On the other are the heavyweight identity providers like Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and JumpCloud. 1Password does not necessarily seek to replace these providers; instead, they integrate with them to secure the gaps those platforms leave behind, such as unmanaged devices and non-SSO applications.
Their recent hero messaging, which explicitly includes AI agents alongside humans, is a calculated bet on the future of work. As organizations deploy autonomous agents to handle repetitive tasks, the need for a 'secure shell' for these agents becomes critical. 1Password is effectively pitching itself as the trust layer for this new class of worker. By providing audit-ready reporting on both human and agent actions, they offer a unified view of organizational risk that few other legacy security companies have yet to prioritize.
A unified platform to discover, secure, and audit AI access, developer endpoints, and automation.
1Password is hiring.