Conviction from Day One: Symmetry Systems Joins Zscaler

Today, Zscaler announced its intent to acquire Symmetry Systems. Congratulations to Mohit Tiwari, Casen Hunger, Puneet Tiwari, and the entire Symmetry team. Thank you for letting us be part of your journey from the very beginning.

Why we backed Symmetry

For the Forgepoint Capital team, Symmetry’s milestone achievement caps off a seven-year collaboration that began with a contrarian bet on data security.

When we initially met Mohit, Casen, and Puneet in 2019, they were chasing a forward-looking security problem before the industry had fully defined it. Data was poised to freely expand to every corner of the enterprise, yet no one could clearly answer the most basic data and identity security questions about where sensitive data lived, who could access it, and how different identities moved it. Every CISO we spoke to confirmed the same gap: they needed object-level data visibility and access governance across every data store, and nothing on the market delivered it.

Backed by the founders’ research-grade technical conviction and a team out of the Spark Research Lab at UT Austin, Symmetry brought deep theoretical foundations of information flow control to the problem. By applying artificial intelligence and data flow concepts, Symmetry created a holistic view of data including its location, classification, usage, and access controls.

The architecture was built around a key principle: in cloud environments, security centers on identity and data as the primary control plane. Applications and infrastructure are ephemeral, but the data and the identities that access them are not. Symmetry became first movers in mapping the complex intersection of data and identities in a graph database, allowing continuous visibility and uncovering misconfigurations and elevated access rights- ultimately defining the now ubiquitous Data Security Posture Management category.

Impressed by the team’s expert vision and novel approach, we had the conviction to lead Symmetry’s Seed round in 2019 before a product had shipped or a customer had signed– our firm’s first-ever founding investment. Following two years of rapid growth in revenue, customers, and employees, we doubled down by investing in Symmetry’s Series A in 2021.

Symmetry’s expansion into enterprise AI security

Symmetry took the next leap in its evolution when enterprise AI adoption accelerated in 2022 and 2023, leveraging its continuous visibility capabilities to innovate AI security. As enterprises raced to train and deploy AI models on their own data, Symmetry’s technology became the cornerstone to securely train and feed information to AI models, preventing data leakage and unauthorized access. We were proud to participate in their 2023 funding round as they brought information flow security to AI models at training and runtime.

Today, customers including major financial institutions, federal agencies, Fortune 50 retailers, and leading HR technology providers trust Symmetry to govern enterprise AI adoption, as well as continuously find, track, and protect sensitive data across their cloud environments.

What the acquisition proves

Today’s acquisition announcement validates Symmetry’s powerful data access graph, particularly for tracking how AI copilots, autonomous agents, and RAG-based applications interact with sensitive data in real time.

Many enterprises struggle to move beyond the AI agent pilot phase because their models and agents move sensitive data in ways traditional controls were not designed to govern. Symmetry’s intelligence layer- visibility across data and both human and non-human identities- will complement Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange enforcement layer to map and govern AI agents in production, enabling enterprises to innovate and scale agentic AI securely.

In closing

Data security has moved from the perimeter of the enterprise to the center of how AI gets built and deployed safely. Symmetry Systems has become a category-defining company capable of addressing core agentic AI security problems and will do so at global scale through its acquisition by Zscaler.

On behalf of the Forgepoint team, we couldn’t be more proud of what the Symmetry team has built, and we look forward to seeing what they accomplish next as part of Zscaler.