Founders: George Kurtz (CEO), Dmitri Alperovitch, Gregg Marston
Launched: 2011
Funding: $156 million
Valuation: $666.7 million (PitchBook)
Disrupting: Cybersecurity, network security
Rival: N/A
George Kavallines
When the Democratic National Committee realized last summer that its networks had been hacked, they called in CrowdStrike, an Irvine, California-based firm, to evaluate and remediate the breach. The company competes in the increasingly crowded field of cybersecurity by offering customers endpoint protection (in other words, workstations) that is delivered as software as a service (SaaS) via its Falcon platform.
Read More FULL LIST: 2017 DISRUPTOR 50
In years past, this kind of protection was offered as a hardware solution that would sit on a company's network. But according to CrowdStrike, the mobility of employees (after all, people are working from lots of different locations with smartphones and laptops, not just at their desks) and the rise of the cloud have made that approach less effective. What CrowdStrike does instead is employ its Falcon platform as a cloud service, thereby controlling the way it works. The company claims this enables it to stop breaches by detecting all attacks, even intrusions that don't utilize malware.
Former McAfee executives George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch launched the company in 2011 and it has been growing at a rapid clip, with a nearly 300 percent increase in deployments worldwide in the past year. So far the company has raised $156 million from investors such as as Accel Partners, Google Capital and Warburg Pincus.
