Cyber startup Tailscale turns to mergers as AI agents flood networks

Agentic coding has taken off in earnest, particularly since late last year when Anthropic PBC released its Claude Opus 4.5 model and it “suddenly was a good coder,” Pennarun said. Photo by Gorodenkoff/Getty Images

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Border0 helps companies manage and monitor the people and technology allowed into different servers and databases. That service, called privileged access management, is a focus of new security questions because of autonomous AI tools, said Avery Pennarun, Tailscale’s co-founder and chief executive.

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“This stuff is getting extra important, because you might have a bot that wants to talk to your database, because you want it to be able to access certain types of data, but maybe you want to prevent it from doing certain kinds of things,” he said.

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The companies declined to disclose financial terms.

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In the past, such PAM services were typically sold to bigger companies or firms with “high compliance requirements,” Pennarun said. But because Border0 is easier to deploy, Tailscale can discuss it with smaller clients, he said.

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A five-person company probably doesn’t need to spend much time worrying about individual user access controls, Pennarun said. But if they each have “100 AI agents, running around communicating with each other, doing whatever they want, you need to spend a lot of time deciding who can access what,” he continued.

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The Tailscale CEO previously told Bloomberg that he’s considering an initial public offering in the long run, and that his company has unexpectedly become a beneficiary of the AI boom. That momentum is continuing, Pennarun said, adding that the company could embark on another fund-raising round “in the not-so-distant future.”

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Agentic coding has taken off in earnest, particularly since late last year when Anthropic PBC released its Claude Opus 4.5 model and it “suddenly was a good coder,” Pennarun said. He added that there was a “boom” in interest in his company aided by the fact that instructions for the popular OpenClaw agentic AI tool referred users to Tailscale.

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In a sign of how AI agents are sparking security worries, Chinese authorities moved to restrict state-run enterprises and government agencies from running OpenClaw AI apps on office computers to defuse potential security risks, Bloomberg News reported this month.

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