CrowdStrike, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity company that fends off hackers by patrolling the edge devices connected to a network, announced today it raised $200 million in a financing round that sets the company’s valuation at more than $3 billion.
Sunnyvale, CA-based CrowdStrike, as an endpoint protection and response platform, uses next-generation antivirus software, scans for behavioral indicators of malicious activity, and deploys other threat detection measures to prevent cyber attacks and mitigate harms when they occur. The Web-based system monitors the laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices connected to its clients’ networks.
CrowdStrike’s Series E financing round was led by General Atlantic, Accel, and IVP, and joined by March Capital and CapitalG. With the new money, the company’s fundraising total adds up to more than $480 million.
“We are building the business to support massive volume across the globe,” CrowdStrike president, CEO and co-founder George Kurtz stated in a blogpost announcing the Series E financing. “This round of funding will accelerate the growth of our operations and the pace of our innovation and technology development.”
Earlier this month, CrowdStrike announced a new $1 million warranty to cover the costs of responding to any data breach within a customer network protected by its CrowdStrike Falcon Endpoint Protection Complete service.
CrowdStrike played a role in the unfolding drama of the 2016 presidential campaign. In April that year, the Democratic National Committee asked the company to investigate the possible infiltration of its computer network, according to Wired. CrowdStrike concluded that a pervasive data breach had been carried out by hackers linked to the Russian government. Some of the stolen DNC documents were shared with WikiLeaks, which published them a few months later at the height of the election campaign.
CrowdStrike, founded in 2011, now has more than 1,000 employees, and claims as clients more than 20 percent of companies in the Fortune 500. It competes in a crowded field of endpoint protection companies, and rated an honorable mention in Gartner’s rankings of Best Endpoint Security and Protection Software of 2017, based on customer reviews. The top-rated company in that survey was Kaspersky Lab, whose service was nonetheless made subject to restrictions for use by U.S. government agencies last year due to concerns that the company might be tied to Russian intelligence agencies, Reuters reported.
Following Kaspersky Lab in the Gartner survey were the endpoint security products of Symantec, Cylance, ESET, Sophos, Microsoft, Malwarebytes, Trend Micro, Webroot, Carbon Black, and CrowdStrike.
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