Cybersecurity behemoth CrowdStrike has splashed the cash on a new security start-up and ramped up its revenue forecast after smashing its quarterly earnings.
The company’s shares rocketed by 25 per cent, to £291.56 a pop, in late Tuesday trading as investors cheered the stellar results and upbeat guidance.
CrowdStrike also revealed it has bagged Flow Security, a cutting-edge Israeli firm launched in 2021. The price tag of the deal was kept under wraps.
Flow Security is the “first and only” firm to offer cloud data runtime security, according to CrowdStrike’s boss and co-founder George Kurtz, who talked about the acquisition on a call with analysts.
The move will see CrowdStrike join the ranks of the latest players to snap up a start-up in the booming DSPM market. Previous deals include Palo Alto Networks’ buyout of Dig Security last November and Rubrik’s takeover of Laminar in August.
CrowdStrike raked in a staggering £668.5 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2024, which ended on 31 January. That’s a 33 per cent jump from the same period last year, and way above the Wall Street analysts’ prediction of £662.3 million.
Kurtz also boasted about the huge growth of its MSSP business, which he said was growing by triple digits year over year, thanks to its top-notch technology, strategy and partners.
He also took a swipe at rival vendors, blasting their products as copycats and patchworks that fail to solve the real security problems.
Kurtz claimed that disjointed, point feature, copycat products clutter the market, attempting to Band-Aid symptoms instead of curing the illness.
“Even worse, multi-platform hardware vendors evangelise their stitched-together patchwork of point products, masquerading as thinly veiled, piecemeal platforms.”
He added that the organisations that fall for these “fragmented, pseudo-platforms” are the ones that end up “suffering from fatigue”.
