Permiso vs Zscaler
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Davis CA universal identity security platform; raised $18M+; detects identity-based threats across cloud control planes and human and machine identities.
About
Permiso is a cloud identity security company founded in 2021 and headquartered in Davis, California. The company was founded by Paul Nguyen and Ian Ahl, former security leaders from FireEye, Mandiant, and Amazon, to address the rapid growth of identity-based attacks in cloud environments. As organizations moved workloads to the cloud, the cloud control plane — the APIs and IAM systems that manage cloud infrastructure — became a primary attack target. Attackers who compromise cloud credentials can provision malicious infrastructure, exfiltrate data, or pivot laterally across cloud accounts without triggering traditional network-based detection.\n\nPermiso raised $18 million in seed and Series A funding from investors including Base10 Partners, Work-Bench, and Okta Ventures. Its platform analyzes activity from cloud identity providers and control planes — AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity Logs, GCP Audit Logs, Okta, and others — to build behavioral models for every human user and machine identity. When an identity behaves in an anomalous way, such as an IAM role making API calls it has never made or a user accessing services outside their normal patterns, Permiso generates an alert with full context about what happened and what resources were affected.\n\nPermiso's Universal Identity Graph correlates activity across multiple cloud environments and identity providers into a single timeline per identity, enabling analysts to trace attack chains across organizational boundaries. The platform is particularly valuable for detecting techniques used in sophisticated cloud attacks such as credential theft, IAM privilege escalation, persistence via new IAM roles, and lateral movement between cloud accounts. Permiso also provides a free cloud investigation tool called CloudGrappler used by threat intelligence researchers.
San Jose zero trust security (NASDAQ: ZS) surpassing $3B ARR FY2025; 500B+ daily transactions across 160+ data centers for 8,650+ enterprises and 35% Forbes Global 2000 competing with Palo Alto Prisma for enterprise zero trust.
About
Zscaler is a San Jose, California-based cloud security company — publicly traded on NASDAQ (NASDAQ: ZS) at approximately $30 billion market capitalization — operating the world's largest security cloud, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, that processes 500+ billion daily transactions across 160+ data centers globally. In fiscal year 2025 (ended July 31, 2025), Zscaler surpassed $3 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with Q4 FY2025 revenue of $719.2 million (21% year-over-year growth), serving 8,650+ enterprise customers including 35% of the Forbes Global 2000. The platform's flagship products — Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA, secure web gateway), Zscaler Private Access (ZPA, zero trust network access), and Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX, application performance monitoring) — have eliminated traditional VPN and network perimeter architectures for thousands of enterprises. Founded in 2007 by CEO Jay Chaudhry (serial security entrepreneur who built and sold four prior security companies); IPO March 2018.
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