Kellie Suever, Procurement Manager, joined the One Energy team Monday. We are delighted to have you on board.
Welcome Kellie!
One Energy is on a trajectory to become a unicorn company and part of our responsibility for being a company on that track is to study what makes unicorn companies so successful.
This week’s post is on CrowdStrike. See below for the text as well as link for pdf of the review by Greg Harrand.
Unicorn Research:
CROWDSTRIKE COMPANY SNAPSHOT
Facts and Figures
Company Background
CrowdStrike was co-founded by George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, two former employees of McAfee. CrowdStrike was founded on the belief that the sophisticated attacks that were forcing the world’s leading businesses into the headlines could not be solved with existing malware-based defenses. The co-founders realized that a brand-new approach was needed – one that combined the most advanced endpoint protection with expert intelligence to pinpoint the adversaries perpetrating the attacks, not just the malware.
Prior to joining McAfee, George Kurtz started Foundstone in October 1999. Foundstone is a worldwide security products and services company which had one of the leading incident response practices in the industry. Foundstone was acquired by McAfee in October 2004.
Prior to founding CrowdStrike, Dmitri Alperovitch was a Vice President of Threat Research at McAfee, where he led the company’s global internet threat intelligence analysis and investigation division. In 2010 and 2011, Alperovitch led the global team that investigated and brought to light numerous cyber espionage intrusions.
CrowdStrike boasts that many of the world’s largest organizations put their trust in them, including three of the ten largest global companies by revenue, five of the ten largest financial institutions, three of the top ten health care providers as well as three of the top ten largest energy companies.
CrowdStrike’s largest public attention came as a result of their forensic analysis provided during the Democratic National Committee cyber-attacks. Their investigation showed two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network prior to the convention taking place.
Finances
The majority of CrowdStrike’s financing has been raised through venture capital class stock sales. Major fundraising efforts since inception have yielded $26,000,000 Series A from Warburg Pincus, $30,000,000 Series B from Accel Partners and Warburg Pincus and the most recent amount of $100,000,000 Series C from Google Capital and Rackspace.
CrowdStrike, although not yet profitable, is aiming to go into the black (to be financially profitable) in the next fiscal year. Because the company is privately held, their financials are private as well; however, CrowdStrike has revealed that its annual revenue run rate for 2017 should exceed $100,000,000.
One Energy’s Takeaways
CrowdStrike has a much different revenue based model than One Energy. CrowdStrike’s revenue is based on subscriptions to their Falcon endpoint protection system. CrowdStrike has more than tripled its growth of total billings and employees year-over-year and significantly increased its core customer base. The strong financial performance of the company is driven by massive worldwide deployments of CrowdStrike Falcon by global Fortune 500 companies. This model is in stark contrast to One Energy. CrowdStrike charges an upfront fee of around $100,000 for the software as well as a reoccurring fee of $50/month per user.
CrowdStrike’s reputation is taking off; hackers have even been turned away from infected machines upon noticing CrowdStrike software. The company prides itself on going toe-to-toe with some of the world’s most sophisticated state-sponsored hacking groups.
CrowdStrike is founded on the belief that traditional antivirus software is an outdated technology. Cyber-criminals can circumnavigate around traditional antivirus software. Rather than focusing just on the malware and installing protection onsite via hardware as traditional antivirus software does, CrowdStrike uses a multi-pronged approach. Unlike traditional approaches, CrowdStrike’s cloud-based solution focuses on an entire sequence of events leading up to an attack, giving defenders a better chance to stop it before there’s damage. Instead of relying on indicators of compromise to determine whether a breach has already occurred, CrowdStrike software is able to identify active indicators of attack to detect and deter before a breach occurs.
One Energy is similar to CrowdStrike in that just as CrowdStrike believes traditional antivirus software is an outdated technology, One Energy believes traditional electric generation is an outdated technology. Both CrowdStrike and One Energy pride themselves by thinking outside the box regarding customer needs.
SOURCES
http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/hack-crowdstrike-billion/
https://www.crowdstrike.com
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