Zero trust pioneer and Zscaler founder Manoj Apte will join Toronto-based identity security provider, 1Password, where he will serve as an independent director.

As a founding member of Zscaler — where he spent almost 13 years and became its chief strategy officer — Apte helped build one of the most influential security platforms in the world and helped define the zero trust model that reshaped how enterprises manage access. Zscaler provides zero trust security for more than 160 data centres worldwide.

He will join 1Password at a time of great transformation, according to the company.

“The rise of AI agents is forcing a fundamental shift in enterprise security: identity is now the perimeter,” David Faugno, CEO of 1Password said in the announcement.

“Manoj helped define how the industry thinks about access through zero trust, and that perspective is exactly what’s needed as we work to help organizations deploy AI agents and automated workflows without losing control of their credentials, secrets and machine identities,” he said.

Many firms looking to manage human, non-human IDs

Apte brings expertise on AI strategy advisory as well as cybersecurity insight when markets are shifting, as many organizations are building AI agents and turning to companies such as 1Password to manage access across human and non-human identities.

He is the second independent director to join 1Password’s board, following Mark Anderson’s appointment in August 2024, according to the company. Apte currently serves as a partner with RR Meadows, a Santa Cruz, Calif. firm which specializes in growing healthy crops with green tech and automation.

Before he joined Zscaler, Apte held product management and engineering leadership roles and became the senior product line manager at Juniper Networks for more than seven years, where he launched high-performance security platforms and contributed to networking and security technologies.

He holds a Ph.D. in computational engineering (machine learning) from Mississippi State University and a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Apte also currently advises companies about cloud-based data, AI and cybersecurity.

“For too long, identity has been centralized, with long-lived and overly permissive access tied to a person. In a world of humans and agents, identity must be delegated narrowly for a specific purpose, locally, and exist ephemerally when needed. 1Password is at the centre of this shift, with the opportunity to become the system of record for identity across humans and their delegated agents and I’m excited to support the team as they bring this bold vision to life,” Apte said.

Helped build zero trust model

At Zscaler, Apte identified a fundamental shift in how access should be secured and helped build the zero trust category around it.

He will join 1Password at a pivotal moment, as the company addresses a new set of security challenges driven by how agentic AI is impacting business: securing access across human, machine and AI workflows, the company stated.

1Password’s enterprise vault protects more than 1.3 billion credentials and secrets and is used by more than one million developers and over 180,000 businesses. Last year, the company surpassed $400 million in annual recurring revenue.

It counts as customers more than 30 per cent of the Fortune 100 and over two‑thirds of the Forbes AI 50.