announced the launch of Falcon Fund, an $20 million dollar early stage investment fund started by CrowdStrike®, in partnership with Accel. Falcon Fund will focus on seed and Series A investments in startups that are building applications on the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform.
The Falcon Fund will act as a co-investor and strategic partner alongside lead investors looking for innovative startups that are passionate about solving today’s most pressing security and IT challenges for customers. CrowdStrike will include selected vendors in the CrowdStrike Store, the first open cloud-based, single-agent Platform as a Service, or PaaS, for cybersecurity. The CrowdStrike Store offers a unified Security Cloud ecosystem of trusted partners and applications to customers. With Falcon Fund, CrowdStrike will help foster innovation for new startups by accelerating route-to-market and ability to commercialize innovation.
CrowdStrike Falcon’s cloud-native, open API architecture was built to provide a shared security ecosystem where developers and partners could dramatically shape the future of security and IT operations. Through the CrowdStrike Store, startups and partners can develop new solutions without the need to build or deploy new endpoint agents or invest in expensive platforms for storage and analytics. The collection and analysis of machine-level data helps to inform security professionals of threats and create programmable actions within the Falcon ecosystem.
CrowdStrike collects massive amounts of endpoint data related to security and IT operations events, currently at the rate of two trillion per week, and enables startups to leverage the platform’s data and infrastructure to rapidly develop new solutions that they can then seamlessly market and deliver via the CrowdStrike Store. Through the Store, CrowdStrike also offers significant partner resources to qualifying startups that include integration, marketing and go-to-market support.
They are investing $20 million in companies willing to make their product a part of the Falcon platform. I’m not sure how much deeper you can read into that. One of the attractions to investing in Crowdstrike is that they can be a “platform” like CRM (other companies build their product to be compatible with CRM to feed and extract data into CRM). Crowdstrike is offering seed money to get this going. Not sure if you could read into it that they’re not getting the traction they’re looking for so paying for it to happen or what. Or what kind of companies they will attract with this seed money. But they’re serious enough to spend $20 million to try and expand the platform.
I am sure there are numerous meanings; most of which could be better answered by a “techie” type of which I am not. However, reading the press release and some other news, it seems like for a mere $20M and partnering with a respectable Silicon Valley VC firm like Accel, Crowdstrike is putting out a “casting call” to all innovators and disruptors to audition to come under the Crowdstrike umbrella of endpoint security. Just think of all the creative, young, private companies out there now that we enter the funnel for review as part of the vetting and due diligence process. As part of that auditioning process, can you imagine the quality and quantities of ideas that senior management will be exposed to, regardless of whether or not Crowdstrike invests in them. Isn’t it basically creating a cybersecurity incubator under your own corporate umbrella in an effort to remain innovative and fresh as new ideas and new threats continue to evolve?
Isn’t it basically creating a cybersecurity incubator under your own corporate umbrella in an effort to remain innovative and fresh as new ideas and new threats continue to evolve?
That’s a pretty good description/conclusion. In the old days you controlled markets by vertical integration. In modern horizontal value chains the most value goes to the “Gorilla” that owns/controls the key intellectual property (IP), i.e. Intel-x86, Microsoft-Windows, Oracle-database, etc. One problem with cybersecurity as a business is that it is very fragmented and it does not have a controlling IP. In Gorilla Game terms, Crowdstrike won’t become a Gorilla but it could become a King and a cybersecurity incubator under their control is a good move in that direction.
There is an interesting precedent set by Apple. When Macintosh was introduced they published a book as thick as a NYC telephone book titled User Interface Guidelines that spelled out how Mac applications should look and feel. They managed to enforce it! Way back when I was a Mac developer and we discovered that Microsoft’s Excel was breaking some rules. During a meeting we let Apple know about it. At first they didn’t believe us but they checked the code and found that we were right. They picked up the phone, called Redmond, and told them to fix it – which Microsoft did.
Apple didn’t have a legal standing to enforce these rules but they were persuasive. This is what made Mac more user friendly, more intuitive than Windows. If Crowdstrike can achieve something similar, it will be very valuable.
Denny Schlesinger
I pointed out another bug to Microsoft but I didn’t have Apple’s clout!
There is a new way of working and a new way of starting and building companies. CROWD is the poster child for this. You take a core idea, build a differentiated software around it and then scale it at a rate never before possible. That’s exactly what CROWD did. They have the Falcon security and AI and blah blah blah, but it is built on AWS that enables massive scalability nearly instantly. They also plugged into other software to build out and on top of their core, SPLUNK for visualization for example.
This incentive is what I believe is the next wave of how tech work gets done by virtualizing staff and employees in order to tap into …CROWDsourcing(ha), flex up and down and add value without administrative costs/load with R&D, development, etc. No doubt tech talent is in high demand and that gives companies less power and higher costs to on board full time and give options, etc. Why not let them realize all their potential and create win-win relationships?
There is another thing that is beginning to see success called GitHub Sponsor. I see this as the same type of thing. https://github.com/sponsors
It just reflects how talent wants to operate, I think, and will just grow from here. Remote work, independence, potentially lucrative, etc. Removing barriers to build value adding services and incentivizing innovation.
