Darktrace Buys Network Traffic Visibility Firm Mira Security

Darktrace purchased a network traffic visibility startup led by Netronome’s CEO to get insights from encrypted network traffic and decryption for customers in regulated industries.

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The Cambridge, England-based cybersecurity AI vendor said its buy of Pittsburgh-area Mira Security will provide organizations with deeper, more comprehensive visibility across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. A close integration of Mira Security’s in-line decryption capabilities is especially critical for highly regulated sectors including financial services, government and critical infrastructure, Darktrace said.

“By bringing the Mira Security team’s deep expertise into Darktrace, we will be able to accelerate innovation, deepen the capabilities of our market-leading network product and unlock even greater security performance for our customers,” Darktrace Chief Strategy Officer Phil Pearson said in a statement. Darktrace didn’t respond to Information Security Media Group interview requests.

Mira Security, founded in 2020, employs 20 people and hasn’t disclosed any outside funding. The company has been led since its inception by Niel Viljoen, who has served as CEO of server networking and coprocessor platform provider Netronome for most of its 22-year existence. Terms of the Darktrace-Mira Security acquisition weren’t disclosed (see: Darktrace Acquires Cado Security as AI Meets Cloud Forensics).

“The combination of Mira Security and Darktrace’s unique technology and brilliant R&D talent will create even more exciting possibilities for protecting complex network environments,” Viljoen said in a statement. “Together, Mira Security and Darktrace will be able to deliver new value for customers and partners.”

Darktrace said the Mira Security team will bring deep expertise in building high-performance software and firmware for network acceleration, enabling 100 Gbps interfaces, increasing ingestion capacity and supporting Darktrace’s strategic deployments. The Mira team’s extensive standards-body experience and technical insight also will enhance Darktrace’s work in low-level networking and protocol design.

Acquisition Builds Off New Partnership Between Two Companies

Mira Security’s engineering team has personnel based in South Africa and the United States, and will expand Darktrace’s capabilities in networking research and development. The combined organization will close the encrypted data blind spot without affecting network performance or requiring complex re-architecting, according to Darktrace.

The acquisition comes just a month after Darktrace and Mira announced a partnership to enable organizations with compliance obligations to decrypt and analyze network traffic in its plaintext form. The partnership reduces blind spots, enables more in-depth investigation of detections and allows Darktrace to only consume half the traffic as compared to other solutions, according to Mira.

The initial integration between Darktrace and Mira Enhanced anomaly insights, maintaining the context of encrypted traffic while enabling in-depth anomaly detection and compliance-ready traffic analysis. It also simplified traffic management by requiring only one feed of TLS-formatted plaintext from Mira to Darktrace, and allows firms to decrypt only the traffic needed for analysis, complying with regulations.

“As traditional network perimeters dissolve and attackers evolve their tactics to bypass detection, organizations need AI that can detect anomalies with precision and contain sophisticated threats at speed and scale,” Matt Bovbjerg, vice president of integrations architecture at Darktrace, said in a statement. “Our partnership with Mira Security helps us provide even more investigative context into encrypted traffic.”

The Mira acquisition comes just six months after Darktrace bought London-based cloud forensics and automation startup Cado Security to enhance the security of multi-cloud environments. Darktrace’s first-ever acquisition came in February 2022, when it purchased attack surface management vendor Cybersprint for $53.7 million to give customers insights that help eliminate blind spots and detect risks.

Darktrace itself was taken private by Thoma Bravo in October 2024 for $5.32 billion to accelerate the company’s organic growth and help it pursue acquisitions and leverage the private equity firms’ operational best practices. The company first completed a London Stock Exchange initial public offering in April 2021 that raised $199.4 million on a $2.05 billion valuation.