SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CrowdStrike® Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWD), a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection, today announced the launch of Falcon Fund, an $20 million dollar early stage investment fund started by CrowdStrike®, in partnership with Accel. Falcon Fund will focus on seed and Series A investments in startups that are building applications on the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform.
The Falcon Fund will act as a co-investor and strategic partner alongside lead investors looking for innovative startups that are passionate about solving today’s most pressing security and IT challenges for customers. CrowdStrike will include selected vendors in the CrowdStrike Store, the first open cloud-based, single-agent Platform as a Service, or PaaS, for cybersecurity. The CrowdStrike Store offers a unified Security Cloud ecosystem of trusted partners and applications to customers. With Falcon Fund, CrowdStrike will help foster innovation for new startups by accelerating route-to-market and ability to commercialize innovation.
CrowdStrike Falcon’s cloud-native, open API architecture was built to provide a shared security ecosystem where developers and partners could dramatically shape the future of security and IT operations. Through the CrowdStrike Store, startups and partners can develop new solutions without the need to build or deploy new endpoint agents or invest in expensive platforms for storage and analytics. The collection and analysis of machine-level data helps to inform security professionals of threats and create programmable actions within the Falcon ecosystem.
CrowdStrike collects massive amounts of endpoint data related to security and IT operations events, currently at the rate of two trillion per week, and enables startups to leverage the platform’s data and infrastructure to rapidly develop new solutions that they can then seamlessly market and deliver via the CrowdStrike Store. Through the Store, CrowdStrike also offers significant partner resources to qualifying startups that include integration, marketing and go-to-market support.
Key benefits of Falcon Fund include:
- For customers: Applications developed by startups give customers access to new and compelling innovations to help increase their overall security posture and optimize IT operations without deploying or managing additional agents.
- For startups: Startups receive resources to help with development and integration of applications, accelerating their go-to market strategy and benefiting from the overall value of the CrowdStrike Falcon ecosystem.
- For partners: Partners are further empowered through the unique, collaborative security cloud ecosystem of the CrowdStrike Store to target new customers by the addition of applications developed by Falcon Fund startups.
“With the launch of Falcon Fund, we are investing in the next generation of innovators who are committed to solving today’s most pressing security and IT challenges by leveraging the unique cloud-native architecture and lightweight agent of the Falcon platform. We plan to invest in companies that share our focus on customer success, simplifying security, IT operations and management with our modern, cloud-native platform,” said George Kurtz chief executive officer and co-founder of CrowdStrike.
“Cyberattacks continue to impact enterprises in every industry, and we're excited to co-invest with CrowdStrike in startups tackling some of the most business-critical issues that organizations face today. Falcon Fund will provide the resources needed to take advantage of the open API-model of the CrowdStrike platform to stop cyber threats and improve IT operations. Through the fund, CrowdStrike and Accel will continue to advance innovation in the cloud and activate the value of threat data at scale,” said Sameer Gandhi, partner at Accel.
To qualify, startups must meet the following criteria:
- An experienced and hungry team looking to tackle a significant problem that requires performing analytics on endpoint data and/or taking actions on the endpoint
- Existing interest from other lead investors, early stage funding rounds preferred
- Usage of the CrowdStrike Falcon cloud platform and endpoint agent
- A product that offers attractive market opportunity
Interested companies looking to submit an application can visit the CrowdStrike website for more details.
For more, read a blog from CEO George Kurtz on the establishment of Falcon Fund.
About CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike® Inc., a global cybersecurity leader, is redefining security for the cloud era with an endpoint protection platform built from the ground up to stop breaches. The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform’s single lightweight-agent architecture leverages cloud-scale artificial intelligence (AI) and offers real-time protection and visibility across the enterprise, preventing attacks on endpoints on or off the network. Powered by the proprietary CrowdStrike Threat Graph®, CrowdStrike Falcon correlates over two trillion endpoint-related events per week in real time from across the globe, fueling one of the world’s most advanced data platforms for security.
With CrowdStrike, customers benefit from better protection, better performance and immediate time-to-value delivered by the cloud-native Falcon platform.
There’s only one thing to remember about CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.
Qualifying organizations can gain full access to Falcon Prevent™ by starting a free trial.
Learn more: https://www.crowdstrike.com/
© 2019 CrowdStrike, Inc. All rights reserved. CrowdStrike, the falcon logo, CrowdStrike Falcon and CrowdStrike Threat Graph are marks owned by CrowdStrike, Inc. and registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and in other countries. CrowdStrike owns other trademarks and service marks, and may use the brands of third parties to identify their products and services.
