Snowflake is acquiring Natoma, a startup focused on governance and observability for AI agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It’s the company’s sixth acquisition since June 2025.
The deal is aimed squarely at a real problem: MCP is quickly becoming the standard way enterprise AI agents connect to internal systems, but the protocol itself doesn’t handle governance. It has no built-in identity controls, no least-privilege access enforcement, no audit trails. Enterprises deploying agentic workflows at scale need all of those things, and right now they’re largely on their own.
Natoma is supposed to fill that gap. The plan is to bring identity-aware authorization, policy enforcement, and auditability into Snowflake’s platform so that when agents start poking around internal data and tools, there’s a clear record of what they accessed, whether they were allowed to, and what they did with it. The “rogue agent” problem - where an AI agent acts outside its intended scope - is exactly what this is designed to prevent.
The broader competitive picture here is worth noting. Snowflake is positioning itself as a potential control plane for enterprise AI, which puts it in direct competition with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, AWS, and Google, all of whom are making similar moves. Whoever owns the governance layer for enterprise agents ends up with significant leverage over how those agents are deployed and what they can touch.
Whether Snowflake can pull that off is an open question, but buying a team that’s already thought hard about MCP-specific security is a reasonable starting point.

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Snowflake is acquiring Natoma, a startup specializing in governance and observability for AI agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The acquisition addresses a critical gap: MCP lacks built-in identity controls, least-privilege access enforcement, and audit trails. Natoma brings identity-aware authorization, policy enforcement, and auditability to Snowflake's platform to prevent rogue agent behavior. This is Snowflake's sixth acquisition since June 2025 and part of its broader strategy to become the control plane for enterprise AI, competing directly with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, AWS, and Google.

Snowflake acquires Natoma to add governance and security for AI agents