The identity surface in enterprise infrastructure is growing faster than the humans on it. Teleport, which builds cryptographic identity infrastructure for AI agents, machines, and workloads alongside people, has ranked 1,508 in the 2026 Inc. 5000 — up from 2,551 the previous year.
The company's jump of 1,043 places in a single year, combined with a No. 31 ranking in the security category specifically, points to accelerating demand for what Teleport calls infrastructure identity: a unified layer that assigns every actor in a production environment a cryptographic identity anchored to a hardware root of trust, with privileges that expire when the task ends.
The timing is not coincidental. As organisations bring AI agents into production environments, the number of non-human identities requiring access to infrastructure is multiplying rapidly. Static credentials and legacy identity and access management systems, designed for human users, were not built for ephemeral agents that spin up, take actions, and terminate, often without any human in the loop.
"You cannot meet the AI opportunity without scale," said Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport. "Every agent deployed to your infrastructure behaves unpredictably, it needs an identity, and must be contained. This is what Teleport was built to solve."
Teleport is Oakland-based and markets itself to enterprises running hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. Its approach replaces fragmented IAM systems with a zero-trust architecture where identity is attached to the workload rather than managed separately. The 2026 Inc. 5000 is the company's second consecutive appearance on the list.
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