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Funding/M&A

CrowdStrike Reportedly Paying $495 Million for AI Security Firms Fiddler, Dreadnode

The acquisitions will add AI agent observability and automated AI security testing capabilities to the CrowdStrike Falcon platform.

By

Eduard Kovacs

| November 3, 2026 (10:12 AM ET)

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CrowdStrike on Tuesday announced agreements to acquire AI agent observability firm Fiddler AI and AI security testing company Dreadnode, in deals reportedly worth a combined $495 million.

CrowdStrike has not disclosed the financial terms of either acquisition. According to The Wall Street Journal, which reported the deals ahead of the official announcements, the cybersecurity giant is paying roughly $400 million for Fiddler and about $95 million for Dreadnode.

CrowdStrike said both purchases will be paid mostly in cash, with a portion in stock subject to vesting conditions. The deals are expected to close in the fourth quarter of CrowdStrike’s fiscal year 2027, which ends on January 31, 2027.

Fiddler was founded in 2018 and is based in Palo Alto, California. In January, it announced a $30 million Series C round that brought its total funding to $100 million.

The company’s technology monitors AI agents and explains the decisions they make. CrowdStrike says Fiddler will add pre-deployment evaluation of agents, tracing of their reasoning and tool calls, and detection of behavioral drift and hallucinations in production.

It will also log agent activity for compliance audits and track token usage and spending. CrowdStrike plans to sell the technology as Falcon Observe.

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Dreadnode, founded in 2023, develops offensive AI security tools. The startup raised $14 million in Series A funding in early 2025.

According to CrowdStrike, Dreadnode’s platform lets users describe in plain language what they want to test. It then runs more than 100 known AI attack strategies, including jailbreaks, prompt injection, and multi-turn and agent-specific attacks.

The tests target AI models, agent reasoning loops, applications and MCP servers. Findings are ranked by severity, mapped to frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and the NIST AI RMF, and fed to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Guardian AI detection and response product as policy recommendations.

The Dreadnode team, led by CEO Brad Palm, will join CrowdStrike’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab. Dreadnode-based testing capabilities are expected to become generally available in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027.

Alongside the acquisitions, CrowdStrike introduced an AI Kill Switch in Falcon Guardian that allows authorized administrators to halt a misbehaving AI agent, prevent it from restarting, and cut off its network access.

CrowdStrike has made several security acquisitions over the past year. In January, it announced plans to buy identity security firm SGNL for $740 million and browser security company Seraphic for a reported $420 million. In September 2025, it agreed to acquire AI security firm Pangea.

Related: Cybersecurity M&A Roundup: 37 Deals Announced in October 2026

Related: Proofpoint Inks $6.3 Billion All-Cash Deal to Acquire Varonis

Written ByEduard Kovacs

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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