CrowdStrike Sets Up $20 Million Falcon Fund

By Amit Chowdhry • Sep 3, 2019
  • Cloud-delivered endpoint protection leader CrowdStrike announced it launched Falcon Fund with a $20 million early-stage fund

CrowdStrike — a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection — has announced the launch of Falcon Fund. The Falcon Fund is a $20 million early-stage investment fund started by CrowdStrike in partnership with Accel. And the Falcon Fund is going to focus on seed and Series A investments in startups that are building applications on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform.

The Falcon Fund is going to 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.

And CrowdStrike will include selected vendors in the CrowdStrike Store — the first open cloud-based, single-agent Platform as a Service (PaaS) for cybersecurity.

The CrowdStrike Store offers a unified Security Cloud ecosystem of trusted partners and applications to customers. With the Falcon Fund, CrowdStrike will help foster innovation for new startups by accelerating route-to-market and ability to commercialize.

CrowdStrike Falcon’s open API architecture was built to provide a shared security ecosystem where developers and partners could shape the future of security and IT operations.

With the CrowdStrike Store, startups and partners are able to develop new solutions without the need to build or deploy new endpoint agents or invest in expensive platforms for storage and analytics. And the collection and analysis of machine-level data helps to inform security professionals of threats and create programmable actions within the Falcon ecosystem.

“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 CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz.

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. And through the Store, CrowdStrike also offers significant partner resources to qualifying startups that include integration, marketing, and go-to-market support.

“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,” added Accel partner Sameer Gandhi.