F5 Buys Startup Fletch to Automate Security With Agentic AI

F5 purchased a San Francisco-based threat management startup led by a serial entrepreneur to bring agentic AI into the company’s application delivery and security platform.

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The Seattle-based company said its acquisition of Fletch will simplify cybersecurity by turning complex, voluminous data into clear, prioritized tasks using AI and natural language processing. Fletch’s agentic AI can autonomously correlate threat intelligence with internal data, F5 said, providing deep contextual intelligence, eliminating alert fatigue and shifting security teams from reactive to proactive operations.

“Security teams are drowning in data, alerts and logs,” F5 Chief Innovation Officer Kunal Anand said in a blog post. “They need actionable context to reduce complexity and respond efficiently. By adding Fletch’s agentic AI capabilities to our platform, we can provide even deeper insights, real-time threat intelligence and proactive security recommendations that empower teams to stay ahead of threats.”

Fletch, founded in 2020, employs 86 people and has raised $28.4 million of outside funding, having most recently received $12.5 million of Series A funding led by True Ventures. The company has been led since inception by Grant Wernick, who co-founded and led natural language search engine Insight Engines as well as Weotta, which created the swipe right IP later popularized by dating apps like Tinder (see: F5 Lays Off 623 Staffers as Customers Postpone New Purchases).

What Sets Fletch Apart From Conventional AI Systems

Fletch’s technology will help F5 customers not only understand what’s happening in their environments, but also know what to do about it immediately, closing the gap between raw data and intelligent action. It synthesizes vast amounts of log data and external threat intelligence to deliver context-rich, decision-ready recommendations, which will help F5 automate much of the security decision-making process.

Unlike conventional AI systems that simply surface data insights, Wernick said Fletch’s agentic AI takes on responsibilities that would otherwise burden human analysts. It not only flags potential threats but also interprets their context, connects them to known malicious behaviors or threat groups and takes decisive steps like assigning remediation tasks or recommending that specific IP addresses be blocked.

“Let’s say a security team receives thousands of alerts daily,” Wernick said. “Agentic AI can analyze this noise, correlate it with external and internal data sources, and prioritize the most critical threats, often before an Indicator of Compromise is found. It can also provide real-time context and assign tasks to other agents, such as, ‘This IP address is associated with a known ransomware group so block it.'”

With thousands of alerts pouring in daily from numerous tools and data streams, Anand said it becomes nearly impossible to know which alerts demand immediate attention and which are noise. Anand argues that Fletch’s integration directly addresses this issue by applying AI to intelligently reduce, filter and prioritize alerts, which includes AI-generated recommendations on what actions to take.

“Customers will gain deeper visibility into their environments with smarter correlations between logs, threat intelligencenand real-time alerts, resulting in more accurate assessments of potential risks,” Anand said in the blog post. “Instead of being overwhelmed by thousands of daily alerts, security teams will see prioritized incidents, helping them focus their efforts on the most critical threats.”

What the Emergence of Agentic AI Means for Security Teams

Wernick said Fletch’s platform translates technical findings into everyday language, creating an environment where analysts, engineers and even non-technical executives can understand the security posture of their organization. This democratization of cybersecurity insight and clear communication of threats using AI enables better decisions across all levels of an enterprise, according to Wernick.

“At Fletch, our mission has always been to simplify cybersecurity by turning overwhelming amounts of data into actionable insights that security teams can prioritize and act on,” Wernick said in the blog post. “By leveraging AI and years of natural language processing know-how, we help organizations translate complex data into clear, human-readable tasks, enabling faster and smarter decision-making.”

Fletch’s Forecaster agent is designed to scan global cybersecurity signals and anticipate the threats most likely to impact a specific organization, Wernick said. Unlike conventional solutions that respond after an Indicator of Compromise (IOC) is identified, Forecaster examines OSINT, internal telemetry and industry-specific threat signals to identify patterns and correlations that suggest imminent risk, Wernick said.

The emergence of agentic AI means that security teams will no longer be buried under dashboards and logs, Wernick said. Instead, Wernick said they will be guided by AI systems that not only understand the threat landscape but anticipate it, offering strategic insights and recommended courses of action before incidents occur.

“I’m thrilled to join F5 and to scale our work helping security and IT teams gain tools that prioritize threats, recommend actionable tasks, and streamline workflows,” Wernick said in the blog post. “This will enable them to spend less time managing noise, while strengthening their security posture and running their infrastructure more efficiently.”