Cybersecurity is extra than simply software program, says George Kurtz, CEO and cofounder of CrowdStrike.
“What we do at CrowdStrike is as outdated as time,” he informed Fortune. “It’s good versus evil. It’s a human nature story embodied in know-how.”
It’s a battle that’s extra pressing and sophisticated than ever, because the rise of AI has ballooned the variety of cyber threats and cyber criminals. This makes M&A—a longstanding characteristic of the cybersecurity sector—extra high-stakes than ever. To make certain, a few of the largest offers of 2025 have been in cyber, from Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk to Google’s proposed $32 billion acquisition of Wiz.
CrowdStrike, which went public in 2019, can be a longtime acquirer, and at this time introduced its acquisition of information observability startup Onum for about $290 million. CrowdStrike at this time additionally introduced its Q2 2025 earnings, beating expectations however providing a softer-than-expected income outlook sending its shares down roughly 4% in after hours buying and selling.
Kurtz solely spoke to Fortune concerning the Onum deal and CrowdStrike’s M&A technique going ahead.
“We wish to get issues on the proper stage,” he stated. “Once you take a look at a few of these different acquisitions, like CyberArk, you’re speaking a couple of 20-year-old know-how firm with plenty of integration danger. These are massive firms, and I’ve seen the film earlier than. After I was at McAfee, we acquired 21 firms, and by no means fairly received them built-in… So, when it comes right down to it, we’re maniacally centered on the shopper expertise, on ensuring we’re disciplined sufficient to get these things built-in. Now we have an incredible observe report of doing that.”
Onum marks one in all CrowdStrike’s early offers since final 12 months’s much-publicized IT outage, which Kurtz says didn’t derail its M&A efforts, however supplied a pause. Within the aftermath, CrowdStrike set a excessive bar and shunned closing any offers, whereas persevering with to speak to firms, entrepreneurs, and VCs, retaining the M&A pipeline lively, stated Kurtz. The Onum deal finally got here collectively in three months. The Madrid-based startup, which counts Daybreak Capital and Perception Companions amongst its VC backers, was particularly compelling to CrowdStrike for its real-time pipeline detection—the power to investigate and detect threats or anomalies in information as it’s being ingested into an organization’s methods.
“If you concentrate on the info we’ve got, we began turning into the Reddit of safety information for all these AI fashions,” stated Kurtz. “The extra information we get in, the bigger the moat we even have, and the larger the chance we’ve got to unravel larger and broader issues from an AI perspective. That’s actually driving our imaginative and prescient for AI-native SOC [security operations center]. It’s a pure extension.”
Partially, that is wanting in direction of a future stuffed with AI brokers.
“Our objective is to safe each AI agent,” stated Kurtz. “Okay, what’s an AI agent? An AI agent is principally superhuman. It has entry to information. It has an identification, although it may be a non-human identification. It has entry to a workflow, and it has entry to methods which can be outdoors of your personal boundaries… So, it has all the publicity that we’re defending towards.
In plenty of methods, Onum is a basic CrowdStrike deal. Since 2017, CrowdStrike has acquired eight firms, together with Humio in 2021 for $400 million and Circulation Safety in 2024 for a reported $200 million.
“There are some firms which can be clearly richly-valued,” Kurtz stated. “I believe a few of these firms don’t understand that they’re beginning to transfer into zombieland: You take a look at their final spherical valuation, and it may be nice for them, however it’s costly and it’s essentially actionable for lots of firms, even ours… So, you begin to hit these massive, multi-billion greenback valuations with not plenty of ARR, comparatively talking, and your pool of patrons dramatically shrinks. That’s why we wish to catch them within the candy spot of the place we will add worth, and that worth accrues to CrowdStrike’s shareholders.”
The objective, ultimately, stays the identical—safety, and preventing the unhealthy guys (who now have extra weapons to play with).
“With gen AI, we’re democratizing destruction,” stated Kurtz. “We’re taking a really refined subject recognized by a comparatively few variety of folks … and now you’re making all that experience accessible to many extra folks. … The most important factor is that you just’re actually compressing the timeframe that the nice guys have to have the ability to cope with these issues, as a result of the unhealthy actors are transferring a lot sooner now.”
What’s one factor Kurtz is certain of, trying to the long run?
“We all know there’s going to be a larger want for safety tomorrow than there’s at this time,” he stated.
