CrowdStrike acquiring cyber startup Bionic for $350 million
The Israeli company was founded just four years ago and has raised $83 million to date
Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike is acquiring Israeli cybersecurity startup Bionic. According to Calcalist estimates, CrowdStrike will pay approximately $350 million for the Israeli company. CrowdStrike, which has a market cap of around $40 billion, officially announced the deal later Tuesday.
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Bionic, which has developed a platform helping organizations operate and protect applications, has raised $83 million in funding to date from investors such as Insight Partners, Cyberstarts, and Battery Ventures. The company raised a $65 million Series B in March 2022.
Founded in 2019 by CEO Idan Ninyo and CTO Eyal Mamo, Bionic has a team of 100 employees based in offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. The employees are all set to join CrowdStrike.
Ninyo previously served in the Israeli army's Unit 81 specializing in tech and was also an early employee at Magic Leap. Mamo was in the IDF's Unit 8200 and previously worked as VP R&D at Cymmetria.
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Bionic develops a platform that helps IT, operations, and security teams at global financial services, and technology companies operate and protect applications more efficiently. Bionic’s application intelligence platform automatically reverses engineers' applications, delivering a comprehensive inventory with architecture and dataflows, monitoring critical changes in production, and enabling developer guardrails to enforce architecture.
Among the investors in Bionic are notable figures such as Gili Raanan, founder of Cyberstarts, and Michael Fey, former president of Symantec and Blue Coat. Additional investors in Bionic include Don Duet, former CTO at Goldman Sachs, Sameer Jain, former CIO of Barclays, and Ariel Maislos, founder of Passave and Anobit.
"This deal is important because it is part of Israel's bread and butter. It strengthens CrowdStrike's presence in Israel, similar to HPE's acquisition of Axis, and this will have a long-term impact on the industry in the country," said Raanan, who according to information obtained by Calcalist, invested $4 million in the company in 2019 at a valuation of approximately $15 million. "While the financial aspect is crucial, so is the technology itself, its preservation, and its distribution among thousands of CrowdStrike customers. All Bionic employees will transition to become CrowdStrike employees following the acquisition."
"The cloud is cybersecurity’s new battleground, yet the industry’s answer to-date has been disjointed point security tools or ‘platforms’ with multiple consoles and agents," said George Kurtz, co-founder and chief executive officer at CrowdStrike. "We are delivering what customers need: modern protection to address cloud security risk comprehensively, through one unified platform. We pioneered cybersecurity for the cloud era, and the addition of Bionic further extends our cloud security leadership on our mission of stopping breaches. Bionic shares our passion for customer-focused innovation and will make a great addition to the CrowdStrike team."
