CrowdStrike establishes early-stage investment fund with Accel

Cloud-delivered endpoint protection solution provider CrowdStrike has announced the launch of Falcon Fund, a $20 million early-stage investment fund started by CrowdStrike, in partnership with Accel.

Falcon Fund will focus on seed and Series A investments in startups that are building applications on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform.

The Falcon Fund will 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.

CrowdStrike will include selected vendors in the CrowdStrike Store, a cloud-based, single-agent Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS, for cybersecurity.

The CrowdStrike Store offers a unified Security Cloud ecosystem of trusted partners and applications to customers.

With Falcon Fund, CrowdStrike will help foster innovation for new startups by accelerating route-to-market and ability to commercialise innovation.

CrowdStrike Falcon's cloud-native, open API architecture was built to provide a shared security ecosystem where developers and partners could dramatically shape the future of security and IT operations.

Through the CrowdStrike Store, startups and partners can develop new solutions without the need to build or deploy new endpoint agents or invest in expensive platforms for storage and analytics.

The collection and analysis of machine-level data help to inform security professionals of threats and create programmable actions within the Falcon ecosystem.

CrowdStrike collects 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.

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

Key benefits of Falcon Fund include:

• For customers: Applications developed by startups give customers access to new and compelling innovations to help increase their overall security posture and optimise IT operations without deploying or managing additional agents.
• For startups: Startups receive resources to help with the development and integration of applications, accelerating their go-to-market strategy and benefiting from the overall value of the CrowdStrike Falcon ecosystem.
• For partners: Partners are further empowered through the unique, collaborative security cloud ecosystem of the CrowdStrike Store to target new customers by the addition of applications developed by Falcon Fund startups.

"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," says CrowdStrike chief executive officer and co-founder George Kurtz.

"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 organisations 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," says Accel partner Sameer Gandhi.

To qualify, startups must meet the following criteria:

• An experienced and hungry team looking to tackle a significant problem that requires performing analytics on endpoint data and/or taking actions on the endpoint
• Existing interest from other lead investors, early-stage funding rounds preferred
• Usage of the CrowdStrike Falcon cloud platform and endpoint agent
• A product that offers attractive market opportunity

Interested companies looking to submit an application can visit the CrowdStrike website for more details.