F5, an application networking business, has announced the $68 million acquisition of Threat Stack, a Boston-based cloud security and compliance startup.
The 25-year-old business is trying to bolster its cloud security portfolio as applications become a rising target for thieves. The agreement comes months after F5 purchased multi-cloud management startup Volterra for $500 million. Attacks on digital experiences cost businesses more than $100 billion every year, according to F5, and these experiences are increasingly driven by applications spread across numerous environments and interconnected by APIs.
Threat Stack specializes in cloud security for applications and provides customers with real-time threat detection for cloud infrastructure and workloads. The company was founded in November 2012 and has raised more than $70 million in six funding rounds, including a $45 million Series C round led by F-Prime Capital Partners and Eight Roads Ventures. Threat Stack, unlike many cloud security technologies, takes a proactive approach, alerting enterprises to all known vulnerabilities and delivering a report on the holes that need to be patched.
The Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform, which works across cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and containerized systems, is arguably best known for its Slack integration, which alerts DevOps teams to security threats in real-time. According to its website, Threat Stack has a number of well-known clients, including Glassdoor, Ping Identity, and Proofpoint. Integration of F5’s application and API protection solutions with Threat Stack’s cloud security capabilities and experience, according to the company, would improve visibility across application infrastructure and workloads, making it easier for clients to adopt uniform security in any cloud.
“Applications are the backbone of today’s modern organizations, and defending them is mission-critical for our customers,” said Haiyan Song, F5’s Executive Vice President of Security. “Threat Stack brings technology and talents to F5 that will boost our security capabilities and help us advance our adaptive applications vision by providing customers with expanded cloud observability and actionable security insights.”
The deal is subject to closing conditions and is scheduled to occur in the first quarter of F5’s fiscal year 2022.
