CrowdStrike Buys Pangea for $260M to Guard Enterprise AI Use

CrowdStrike plans to purchase an artificial intelligence security startup led by the founder of SOAR pioneer Phantom to secure enterprise AI users and developer workflows at scale.

See Also: AI Agents Demand Scalable Identity Security Frameworks

The Austin, Texas-based platform security goliath said its proposed acquisition of Silicon Valley-based Pangea will address AI risks such as prompt injection, unauthorized access and AI misuse, said Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard. He said Pangea will play a key role in CrowdStrike’s vision to secure AI through a three-layered approach focused on core infrastructure, software orchestration and identity.

“We have a pretty tried-and-true playbook on bringing new technologies into the company, integrating them natively into the platform and then building them into really successful businesses,” Bernard told Information Security Media Group. “We saw the opportunity to create and own the AIDR category with Pangea. CrowdStrike created the category of EDR. How do we extend detection and response to AI?”

Pangea, founded in 2021, employs roughly 40 people and raised $51 million in outside funding, having most recently completed a $26 million Series B funding round in November 2022 led by GV. The company has been led since its inception by Oliver Friedrichs, who previously led and sold SOAR vendor Phantom Cyber to Splunk for $350 million in April 2018. CrowdStrike will pay $260 million for Pangea (see: CrowdStrike Buys Onum for $290M to Boost SIEM Data Ingestion).

How Pangea Safeguards the Infrastructure, Identity Layers

Organizations are looking for ways to secure the AI tools and systems they are integrating into business workflows, and Bernard said CrowdStrike aims to fill that gap with Pangea as the cornerstone. Just as CrowdStrike once created and led the endpoint detection and response as well as identity threat detection and response spaces, Bernard said the company now seeks to perform the same feat in the AI realm.

“There’s certainly a lot of buzz, activity and necessity in the market around how we societally secure AI,” Bernard said. “This one really covers the ‘security for AI’ societal market need.”

Bernard said Pangea’s technologies such as prompt injection blocking, data governance and malicious agent detection give CrowdStrike the visibility and control required to monitor AI activity at multiple levels. In the AI era, security must account for not just systems and users, but autonomous agents, agentic behaviors and evolving machine-user interactions, and Pangea is now a critical asset for that.

Most of Pangea’s strength lies at the infrastructure and identity layers, though the firm’s orchestration tools touch the software layer as well, according to Bernard. For example, Bernard said Pangea’s detection of AI-specific vulnerabilities like prompt injection attacks occurs at the identity layer, while ensuring secure model access and data flow happens at the infrastructure layer.

“The core infrastructure layer is really where a lot of the componentry comes into play,” Bernard said. “How do you secure the data center? How do you secure the GPUs? How do you secure data in transit, data at rest? And then, ultimately, how do you secure the cloud?”

What Makes Pangea’s Approach to AI Security Different

Many companies in the AI security space have focused narrowly on either securing AI for workers using AI tools, or for developers embedding AI into applications. Conversely, Bernard said Pangea can support both ends of the spectrum, with the team building detection and control features that work just as effectively for prompt-driven user interactions as they do for code-level development workflows.

“A lot of companies start building for one, and they miss the ability to then pivot later,” Bernard said. “The developer user has a different workflow. The end user is going to use a finished model and an agent. Being able to go from prompt all the way back to specific code usage is really the difference there.”

Technically, Pangea will enhance core Falcon modules, including cloud security, data protection, identity threat detection and response, Bernard said. He also teased a new user interface that will unify the customer experience across modules, continuing CrowdStrike’s efforts to make security feel seamless rather than siloed.

“What’s nice about our platform approach is there’s many ways that we can bring the capability set of Pangea to life for the customer, to enhance not only security perspectives, but also make this extremely competitive,” Bernard said. “We have announced a whole new UI and a whole new user experience that brings all of our native modules even closer together.”

Bernard expects AI agents to become core members of the enterprise workforce with digital assistants, copilots, bots and autonomous systems capable of executing tasks, making decisions and scaling work output exponentially. From blocking malicious activity to ensuring safe prompts and secure credentials, Bernard believes securing identity – whether human or not – will be key to future-proofing cybersecurity.

“The preliminary data that we already know is that this is the industry’s best protection against prompt injection, with 99% efficacy at sub-30 milliseconds latency,” Bernard said. “We’re providing the technology the market needs to securely adopt the next biggest and best thing I think maybe all of us have seen in our lifetimes – the agentic revolution.”

The Pangea deal comes weeks after CrowdStrike agreed to buy telemetry pipeline management startup Onum for $290 million to transform how third-party data is ingested into the company’s SIEM platform. It was also the second AI security startup acquisition announced this week, with Check Point Software agreeing to buy Lakera for $300 million to provide end-to-end security for AI usage and applications (see: Check Point Adds AI Application Defense With Lakera Purchase).