Whether or not Crowdstrike's cloud-based endpoint security platform will be snatched up by Google, Microsoft, or Amazon remains to be seen, but its co-founder and CEO George Kurtz said "it certainly could be."
On CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday, Kurtz told Andrew Ross Sorkin that while there are no current plans in the works, there is a very real possibility that a company such as Amazon or Google could ultimately buy its cloud-delivered endpoint security capability, which is powered by artificial intelligence, and make it part of their stack.
"They continue to partner with folks like us who specialize in this, and I think that's what a lot of the larger companies have done. They are focused on the infrastructure and making it all work, and they look to companies like Crowdstrike." Amazon, he said, "is a big partner. We actually supply some of the intelligence for some of the services behind Amazon, which is their GuardDuty service, so its worked out quite well so far."
At No. 27, this is Crowdstrike's second year to make the CNBC Disruptor 50, an annual list of the top 50 companies whose innovations are changing the world. Its next-generation technology, services delivery and intelligence continues to disrupt the multibillion-dollar cybersecurity industry.
The company's platform, named Falcon, enables it to identify what are called active indicators of attack in order to detect and curtail malicious activity before a breach actually happens. "Essentially, we're protecting the endpoint computer — a desktop or a server. We're delivering it from the cloud, so a lot of the heavy lifting and all of the algorithms are in the cloud, but we have a small lightweight piece of software, an agent that runs on every machine, whether it's a desktop or a server.
Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, both former McAfee executives, launched the company in 2011, and it has been experiencing massive growth ever since, with a nearly 300 percent increase in deployments worldwide in the past year. "We continue to double in size every year in terms of revenue, head count, geographic expansion," Kurtz said.
Crowdstrike's customers include ADP, Shutterstock, Sony and the state of Wyoming, to name a few.
Yet one place Crowdstrike has no plans to expand to is China, he told CNBC. "We've done really well not being in China," he said. "In terms of overall opportunity, even the large public antivirus companies don't do that much in China, because of the companies that are actually based there."
The company has raised $281 million from investors, such as Accel Partners, Google Capital and Warburg Pincus.
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