George Kurtz on CrowdStrike's $290 million Onum acquisition and cybersecurity M&A

""There are some companies that are obviously richly-valued," Kurtz told Fortune. "I think some of these companies don't realize that they are starting to move into zombieland: You look at their last round valuation, and it might be great for them, but it's expensive and it's necessarily actionable for a lot of companies, even ours." To be sure, there have been a couple of notable big-ticket acquisitions in cyber lately: Palo Alto Networks' $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk and Google's proposed $32 billion acquisition of Wiz."

"CrowdStrike, which went public in 2019, is a longtime acquirer, and this week announced its acquisition of data observability startup Onum for about $290 million. Kurtz exclusively spoke to Fortune about the Onum deal. Onum marks CrowdStrike's first deal since last year's much-publicized IT outage, which Kurtz says didn't derail its M&A efforts, but offered a pause. In the aftermath, CrowdStrike set a high bar and refrained from closing any deals, while continuing to talk to companies, entrepreneurs, and VCs, keeping the M&A pipeline active, said Kurtz."

"The Onum deal ultimately came together in three months. The Madrid-based startup, which counts Dawn Capital and Insight Partners among its VC backers, was especially compelling to CrowdStrike for its real-time pipeline detection-the ability to analyze and detect threats or anomalies in data as it is being ingested into a company's systems."

CrowdStrike follows a Goldilocks M&A approach, targeting cybersecurity startups at an intermediate stage where integration risk is low and value can be added. The company avoids richly valued firms that verge on "zombieland" and seeks deals that accrue value to shareholders. Recent large cyber deals include Palo Alto Networks' $25 billion CyberArk purchase and Google's proposed $32 billion acquisition of Wiz. CrowdStrike acquired data observability startup Onum for about $290 million, marking its first deal after an IT outage pause. The Onum acquisition closed in three months and was attractive for real-time pipeline detection that analyzes threats as data is ingested.

Read at Fortune