CrowdStrike acquires identity security startup for $740M
CrowdStrike (CRWD) said on Thursday that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire SGNL, an identity security startup based in Palo Alto, California.
The deal was for $740 million, according to Reuters. CrowdStrike said that the transaction would be paid predominantly in cash, with a portion to be delivered in the form of stock subject to vesting conditions.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of CrowdStrike's fiscal year 2027, pending regulatory approval and other closing conditions.
SGNL specializes in continuous identity, which is a newer approach that constantly verifies a user's identity and access privileges in real-time, rather than just at login.
The technology analyzes contextual signals like location, device and behavior to adapt security dynamically.
According to CrowdStrike, the acquisition will enhance its identity security around both human and AI by powering SGNL with real-time intelligence from Falcon, its agentic security platform.
It intends to extend dynamic authorization across SaaS and hyperscaler cloud access.
“AI agents operate with superhuman speed and access, making every agent a privileged identity that must be protected,” CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz said in a statement.
“With SGNL, CrowdStrike will deliver continuous, real-time access control that eliminates the known and unknown gaps from legacy standing privileges."
With continuous identity technology, access can constantly be granted or revoked based on real-time risk.
"We’re disrupting the premise of modern privilege and access – for every identity, human or machine," Kurtz added. "This is identity security built for the AI era.”
CrowdStrike noted that with legacy identity security tools, the process is based on static policies and standing privileges.
This means that they "cannot reassess risk or revoke access as threat conditions change, leaving organizations exposed as AI identities operate autonomously."
The AI era requires a new approach that includes a dynamic and continuous risk evaluation, the company said.
“SGNL was founded to connect access decisions with business reality,” Scott Kriz, CEO and co-founder of SGNL, said in a statement.
“The world needs our technology to eradicate the significant risk that legacy standing privileges expose in today and tomorrow’s environments."
He added that joining CrowdStrike provides SGNL with "global scale natively" that will allow it to "transform enterprise security with Continuous Identity, furthering CrowdStrike’s mission of stopping breaches."
Citing data from IDC, CrowdStrike said that the identity security market is expected to grow from $29 billion in 2025 to $56 billion by 2029.
CrowdStrike's stock fell 3.1% on Thursday.
CrowdStrike has been ramping up its efforts in the AI space. In November, the company announced a partnership with AI cloud company CoreWeave (CRWV) in an effort to build a foundation for AI cloud security.
The aim is to create a security platform for the agentic era that will eventually be able to also secure the platforms built for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which will be the stage when computers can match or surpass human intelligence.
That same month, the company said that it was partnering with Nvidia (NVDA) to bring “always-on, continuously learning AI agents for cybersecurity to the edge” through select Nvidia models in order to “build, power, and secure the agentic ecosystem.”