Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Natoma, a premier enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform for AI agents. Upon the closing of the transaction, Snowflake will integrate Natoma’s architecture to establish a native, identity-aware governance layer for AI agents and MCP tool access. This strategic move simplifies how modern enterprises secure, monitor, and manage the interactions between autonomous AI systems and their core databases, applications, APIs, and developer tools.
Bridging the Action Gap in Enterprise AI
As corporate workflows transition from passive AI co-pilots to autonomous AI agents capable of executing multi-step business operations, traditional data governance models are being pushed past their limits. The rapid adoption of the open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) has introduced severe operational bottlenecks, including fragmented access management, the rise of “Shadow AI,” and heightened data exfiltration risks when agents bridge separate corporate ecosystems.
According to Snowflake’s recent AI research, an overwhelming 96% of organizations still face significant challenges when scaling AI architectures across the enterprise. By embedding Natoma into the AI Data Cloud, Snowflake addresses this challenge directly, expanding its security boundary from basic data access to the specific real-world actions AI agents take within a corporate network.
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“AI agents are quickly becoming part of how enterprises operate, but intelligence without governance creates risk,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake. “Agents don’t just need access to data. They need the right context, permissions and policy guardrails to operate safely inside the enterprise. Snowflake has long served as the governed data foundation for enterprises, and with Natoma’s expertise in identity governance and privileged access management, we can extend that trust layer to AI-driven actions and workflows. With Natoma in Snowflake, coding agents can finally come alive inside the enterprise – secure, auditable and ready to operate at scale.”
Securing the Agentic Control Plane at Scale
The acquisition will allow Snowflake customers to safely link Cortex Agents, Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Code, and external AI platforms to critical enterprise resources—spanning SaaS ecosystems, isolated virtual private clouds (VPCs), and legacy on-premises environments.
Through a verified, centralized library of MCP servers, Natoma provides the vital control fabric that defines how AI systems discover and interact with corporate data assets. The integrated architecture delivers:
Identity-Aware Authorization: Enforcing precise user- and agent-level permissions at the individual tool-call layer.
Granular Policy Enforcement: Mitigation of security threats and processing loops that have no bounds with centrally managed guardrails.
End-to-End Auditability: Creation of comprehensive and tamper-free logs of every AI-driven transaction for complete audit trail visibility.
The above framework enables organizations to enhance the quality of their business data in the Snowflake environment by adding live business context through messaging platforms such as Slack and emails, among other mission-critical systems, without the worry of violating organizational compliance policies.
“AI agents will only become enterprise-ready if organizations can govern how they operate across systems, applications and tools,” said Pratyus Patnaik, Co-Founder and CEO of Natoma. “Together with Snowflake, we’re building the governance and connectivity layer that enables enterprises to securely operationalize AI at scale.”
Natoma’s enterprise-grade platform is already actively deployed across major global corporations to secure production-level agentic networks. The Natoma engineering team brings deep industrial expertise in gateway infrastructure, identity governance, and privileged access management (PAM). Natoma’s full suite of capabilities will be integrated natively into Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and rolled out to global customers in the coming months.