Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike is acquiring two AI security companies in order to more broadly monitor, test, and cover AI models and agents. As companies across various industries begin to deploy AI agents and models on a large scale, this market is also heating up.

CrowdStrike indicates that Fiddler AI and Dreadnode will be acquired. Fiddler AI provides observability software for monitoring the AI agents within the enterprise; Dreadnode helps companies automate security testing, specifically designed to identify vulnerabilities before AI models, applications, and agents go live.

According to The Wall Street Journal, CrowdStrike paid approximately $400 million to Fiddler AI and about $95 million to Dreadnode.

These transactions occur at a time of significant changes in the field of network security, especially as internal policies and processes of enterprises cannot keep up with the adoption speed of AI. Teams and individual employees are testing AI tools, automated workflows, developing custom applications using vibe-coding, and deploying a large number of AI intelligents to perform tasks for them, which undoubtedly brings troubles to the security teams.

CrowdStrike's products are widely used by enterprises and governments, and it is evident that the company is attempting to leverage its existing scale and influence to gain a share in this rapidly growing market. Of course, it is not the only company doing so. Previously, several startups and cybersecurity providers have raised tens of millions of dollars in funding to try to address these issues, but most of these solutions are based on the assumption that existing security software is insufficient to monitor and control AI tools, connectors, or usage patterns.

The company itself has also been building a detection and response control system named Falcon Guardian, which helps businesses to monitor and understand the behavior of agents on devices, and these acquisitions seem to further enrich its product line.

Fiddler AI will be integrated into the Falcon platform of CrowdStrike, becoming Falcon Observe. As envisioned, it will assist customers in conducting evaluations before deploying agents, understanding their behavior, and monitoring their activities, while also feeding this information into a broader platform as telemetry data. Dreadnode will be incorporated into the Falcon Guardian product, where its software will provide test results as recommendations for security strategies.

Fiddler AI was established in 2018, and according to PitchBook data, it has raised a total of approximately 99 million US dollars to date. Dreadnode was founded in 2023 and has raised 14 million US dollars so far.