CrowdStrike to buy two AI security startups for nearly $500 million
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike will acquire Fiddler AI and Dreadnode to broaden how it monitors, tests and protects AI models and agents. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deals total roughly $495 million.
US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike has announced it will acquire two AI security firms, Fiddler AI and Dreadnode. The purchases are meant to extend its products so they can monitor, test and protect AI models and AI agents (programs that carry out tasks on users' behalf) more broadly, as companies across industries begin deploying such tools at scale.
What is being acquired
Fiddler AI makes observability software for monitoring AI agents inside enterprises. Dreadnode helps companies automate security testing aimed at finding flaws in AI models, apps and agents before they go live. The Wall Street Journal reports that CrowdStrike is paying around $400 million for Fiddler AI and about $95 million for Dreadnode.
Integration into CrowdStrike products
Fiddler AI will become part of CrowdStrike's Falcon platform under the name Falcon Observe. It will help clients evaluate agents before deployment, understand their actions and monitor their behavior, and pass that information to the wider platform as telemetry. Dreadnode will be built into Falcon Guardian, receiving its testing results as security policy recommendations. Falcon Guardian is CrowdStrike's own set of detection and response controls, designed to show companies what agents are doing on their devices.
Market context
The deals come during a period of major change in cybersecurity, as corporate policies and processes lag behind the pace of AI adoption. Teams and individual employees are experimenting with AI tools, automating workflows, building custom apps with AI assistance and deploying large numbers of AI agents, which creates difficulties for security teams. Several startups and security vendors have already raised funding on the premise that existing security software is not enough to monitor and control AI tools, connectors or usage.
Fiddler AI was founded in 2018 and, according to PitchBook, has raised about $99 million in total. Dreadnode, founded in 2023, has raised $14 million so far.
