CrowdStrike reportedly to pay $495M for Fiddler AI, Dreadnode
TL;DR
- CrowdStrike announced acquisitions of Fiddler AI (~$400M) and Dreadnode (~$95M), reportedly $495M combined, mostly cash with vesting stock, closing by January 31, 2027.
- Fiddler, founded 2018 in Palo Alto with $100M total funding, brings pre-deployment agent evaluation, reasoning tracing, drift detection and hallucination monitoring.
- Dreadnode CEO Brad Palm's team joins CrowdStrike's Cyber Superintelligence Lab; its tool runs 100+ attacks mapped to OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and NIST AI RMF.
CrowdStrike has announced two AI-security acquisitions reportedly worth a combined $495 million, with roughly $400 million going to AI-agent observability firm Fiddler AI and about $95 million to offensive-security startup Dreadnode. SecurityWeek reports the deals will be paid "mostly in cash, with a portion in stock subject to vesting conditions," and are expected to close in the fourth quarter of CrowdStrike's fiscal 2027, ending January 31, 2027.
Fiddler, founded in 2018 and based in Palo Alto, raised a $30 million Series C in January that lifted its total funding to $100 million. Its agent-monitoring stack handles "pre-deployment evaluation of agents, tracing of their reasoning and tool calls, and detection of behavioral drift and hallucinations in production," per the SecurityWeek piece.
Dreadnode is the red-team half of the bundle. "The Dreadnode team, led by CEO Brad Palm, will join CrowdStrike's Cyber Superintelligence Lab," SecurityWeek reports. The startup, founded in 2023 and funded with a $14 million Series A in early 2025, ships a tool that "lets users describe in plain language what they want to test" before running "more than 100 known AI attack strategies, including jailbreaks, prompt injection, and multi-turn and agent-specific attacks," mapped to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and the NIST AI RMF.
Alongside the deals, CrowdStrike introduced an AI Kill Switch in Falcon Guardian that lets administrators halt a misbehaving agent, block restarts and cut its network access. The $495 million figure and the underlying splits come from reporting rather than CrowdStrike's own filings.
Originally reported by securityweek.com
Read the original article →Original headline: CrowdStrike to Pay $495M for Fiddler AI and Dreadnode, Buying Agent Monitoring and Red-Team Tooling