Global AI data cloud company Snowflake announced on May 29 that it has acquired Natoma, a company specializing in the Enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform. This acquisition aims to establish a governance layer for the integrated management of AI agents' access to corporate systems.
With this acquisition, Snowflake will embed a native identity governance and access management framework into its platform, which will govern how AI agents access applications, databases, APIs, and tools within organizations.
The MCP serves as a standard protocol for AI agents to connect and interact with external systems, rapidly gaining traction in enterprise AI environments. However, as agents become more interconnected with corporate systems, concerns about governance fragmentation, shadow AI, and data leakage risks have been raised.
A recent survey by Snowflake revealed that 96% of companies face challenges in scaling AI across their enterprises.
Natoma's platform provides reliability, visibility, and audit tracking for agent access across various enterprise environments, including SaaS, cloud, VPC, and on-premises setups. It also supports integration with a range of business systems such as Slack, email, CRM, and Jira.
The Natoma team possesses expertise in MCP, gateway infrastructure, and privileged access management (PAM), having already supplied agent systems to major global corporations in operational environments.
Snowflake plans to integrate Natoma's capabilities into its AI data cloud, establishing an enterprise-grade control system across its AI platforms, including Cortex Agent, Snowflake Intelligence, and Cortex Code. The timeline for customer rollout following the acquisition will be announced later.
Pratiyus Panayak, co-founder and CEO of Natoma, stated, "For AI agents to be truly utilized at an enterprise level, organizations must secure governance over how agents operate across systems, applications, and tools. Natoma and Snowflake will work together to build a governance and connectivity layer that allows companies to leverage AI safely and at scale."
* This article has been translated by AI.
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