CrowdStrike valued at $3 billion with new $200 million infusion
Prominent California-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike announced on Tuesday that it is valued at more than $3 billion, after bringing in $200 million in Series E funding.
General Atlantic, Accel and IVP led the round. March Capital and CapitalG participated.
The private company provides with cloud-hosted endpoint security using artificial intelligence, providing its customers with visibility into risks and threats their networks face. CrowdStrike claims that its platform processes 100 billion security events per day.
The company has garnered attention for responding to high-profile security incidents and publishing research on nefarious threat actors. The Democratic National Committee brought CrowdStrike on to investigate its 2016 breach.
About a year ago, the company said it was valued at $1 billion after closing $100 million in funding. In that year, the company says it has doubled its revenue. It also says it’s serving a fifth of Fortune 500 companies.
CEO George Kurtz said in a statement that the new funding will support CrowdStrike’s growth of operations, technological development and geographic expansion. A CrowdStrike spokesperson told CyberScoop by email that the company is expanding into new markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific.
“[T]he market is clearly embracing our next generation cloud-based solution and our focus is on building CrowdStrike to address the need,” the spokesperson said. “There is an enormous unaddressed demand for effective cybersecurity technology and services and we will continue to help customers get ahead of cyber threats and stop breaches.”
Having been a “unicorn” for a year, CrowdStrike is closely watched, among other cybersecurity companies, for major business moves. Observers suspect the company is inching toward an initial public offering. Speaking on CNBC last month, Kurtz did not dismiss the possibility of being acquired by a cloud giant such as Amazon or Google.
Tanium, Tenable and other competitors in the endpoint security space are also being watched for IPO news. Carbon Black, another competitor, went public in May.
As it it looks to distinguish itself from the competition, CrowdStrike recently announced that it would provide its customers a free $1 million warranty for breaches that occur on a network it is protecting with the Falcon EPP Complete platform. That move, however, drew criticism from Forcepoint executives as a marketing gimmick.
The CrowdStrike spokesperson said that the company is offering the warranty because it is confident in its platform’s capabilities to fend off breaches in the first place. The warranty can cover legal fees, forensic investigations, public relations costs and other costs associated with responding to a breach.
“The warranty provides an extra layer of protection at no additional cost to customers, giving them peace of mind. No one else in the industry is offering a $1 million breach prevention warranty,” the spokesperson said.
