CROWDSTRIKE

George Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011 after 18 years at McAfee, where he served as CTO. He saw that legacy antivirus was fundamentally broken — attackers had evolved past signature-based detection years ago.

The insight: security needed to move to the cloud, use AI to detect unknown threats based on behavior, and treat every endpoint as a sensor. Co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch was a world-class threat intelligence expert.

CrowdStrike famously investigated the 2016 DNC hack attributed to Russian intelligence.

CrowdStrike sells cloud-native endpoint security — software on every laptop, server, and device that uses AI to detect and stop cyberattacks in real time. The product is Falcon, sold as a subscription per endpoint per year.

The platform model means once Falcon is deployed, CrowdStrike can upsell 20+ additional security modules without deploying new agents. Net revenue retention consistently above 120%.

CrowdStrike Falcon (endpoint detection), Falcon OverWatch (managed threat hunting), Falcon Intelligence (threat intel), Charlotte AI (AI assistant), Falcon Cloud Security

Land and expand. Deploy the core endpoint agent (often replacing legacy antivirus), then upsell additional modules year after year.

The threat graph processes trillions of security events per week and gets smarter with every new customer. International expansion and cloud security are the next growth vectors.

The July 2024 global outage. A flawed Falcon sensor update crashed 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide, grounding flights, shutting down hospitals, and paralyzing businesses.

A cybersecurity company caused one of the biggest IT outages in history. Stock dropped 40%.

The trust rebuild will take years.

Warburg Pincus, Accel, CapitalG (Google), March Capital, Telstra Ventures