Palo Alto Networks, the Nasdaq-listed cybersecurity company, acquired Console, a startup whose AI agents handle routine IT help-desk work. Palo Alto announced on September 1, 2026, that the acquisition had been completed, and said it would use Console to deepen the agentic capabilities of Cortex, its security operations platform.
The company did not disclose terms. TechCrunch reported that Palo Alto Networks paid $500 million in cash and stock, citing two people with knowledge of the deal. Palo Alto Networks declined to comment on the figure.
Console was founded in 2024. According to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch, it was valued at $157 million before the sale, meaning the reported price was a little more than three times its last private valuation.
What Console built
Console sold an AI-native platform for IT service management. Its agents carried out common help-desk tasks without a person in the loop: resetting passwords, granting employees access to applications such as Figma and Miro, and working through routine troubleshooting, TechCrunch reported. Its customers included Ramp, Flock Safety and Scale AI.
Palo Alto Networks described the product more broadly, as a platform that lets organisations apply AI-driven analysis and action across enterprise operations so they can resolve alerts, issues and requests at machine speed.
Co-founder and chief executive Andrei Serban started Console shortly after his previous company, the code-security platform Fuzzbuzz, was acquired by Rippling, according to TechCrunch. Palo Alto did not disclose how many Console employees were joining.
“We built Console around a simple idea: people should be able to express an operational goal, and intelligent software should handle the complexity required to achieve it.”
The funding and the investors
Console raised $29 million in two rounds, TechCrunch reported: a $6.2 million seed round led by Thrive Capital and a $23 million Series A co-led by DST Global Partners and Thrive. SV Angel and Abstract Ventures also invested.
One of its angel investors was Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto Networks' chairman and chief executive, TechCrunch reported. Neither company addressed his earlier investment in its announcement.
Why Palo Alto Networks is buying
Palo Alto plans to put Console inside Cortex, which uses AI to detect and respond to threats. The company said Console's technology would help security teams investigate signals, prioritise work and take action across their environments, and TechCrunch reported that it would let teams investigate and resolve alerts using natural language.
Arora said in the announcement that security operations could no longer be about managing dashboards and queuing tickets. He said customers would be able to hold a direct conversation with their data and build agentic workflows in natural language that raise alerts and fix issues automatically, which he called a shift to software-as-an-agent.
Serban said Console's customers had already shown that agents could cut overhead sharply, and that joining Palo Alto would give the team security expertise, a platform foundation and global scale to bring the approach to the largest enterprises. He said the combined company could make agentic operations faster to adopt and safer to govern.
Palo Alto Networks says it serves more than 70,000 customers with products covering network, cloud, security operations, AI and identity security. With Console it adds agents built for the operational work around those products, such as tickets, access changes and troubleshooting.
A busy year of deals for Palo Alto
Console was Palo Alto Networks' seventh acquisition of 2026, according to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch. Earlier deals this year included the observability platform Chronosphere, at a valuation of $3.35 billion, and the cyber startup Koi, for $400 million.
The sale also changes the field of startups trying to automate IT service management, a market led by ServiceNow. TechCrunch said Console's main startup rival was Serval, which reached a $1 billion valuation after a $75 million Series B led by Sequoia last December and has expanded from IT support into HR, legal and finance. One investor, not a Serval backer, told TechCrunch the deal leaves Serval as the startup to watch in the category.
