Identity security company CyberArk has agreed to acquire the machine identity management firm Venafi in a $1.54 billion deal. CyberArk said on Monday it will make the purchase from the private equity firm Thoma Bravo using about $1 billion in cash and the rest in shares. 

The acquisition will enable CyberArk to “establish a unified platform for end-to-end machine identity security at enterprise scale,” the company said in a release announcing the deal. Venafi’s services include security certificate lifecycle management, private Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Internet of Things identity management, and cryptographic code signing.

“The number of machines is rapidly outpacing the growth in their human counterparts, with more than 40 machine identities for every human identity. Left unprotected, they serve as a lucrative hunting ground for cybercriminals,” CyberArk wrote. 

The deal is expected to close in the second half of this year. CyberArk, headquartered in Massachusetts, said acquiring Utah-based Venafi would allow them to protect “machine identities in a cloud-first, GenAI, post-quantum world.” 

The acquisition is one of a handful of large deals in the industry in May —  including the cloud company Akamai Technologies announcing that it would acquire application programming interface security company Noname Security for $450 million, and industrial technology company Crane NX’s intended purchase of authentication solutions provider OpSec Security, reportedly for $270 million.