THE CRUNCH
CrowdStrike has announced agreements to acquire Fiddler AI, which monitors AI agents and explains their decisions, and Dreadnode, which builds automated AI security testing tools. CrowdStrike has not disclosed the financial terms of either deal, but The Wall Street Journal, which reported the transactions ahead of the official announcements, puts the combined cost at roughly $495 million: about $400 million for Fiddler and $95 million for Dreadnode.
The transactions should complete in the final quarter of CrowdStrike's fiscal 2027, which runs to 31 January 2027. Fiddler, founded in 2018 and based in Palo Alto, raised a $30 million Series C in January, bringing its total funding to $100 million. Its technology will be sold as Falcon Observe, adding pre-deployment evaluation of AI agents, tracing of their reasoning and tool calls, detection of behavioural drift and hallucinations in production, compliance audit logging, and token usage tracking.
Dreadnode, founded in 2023, raised $14 million in Series A funding in early 2025. Its platform lets users describe in plain language what they want to test, then fires over 100 recognised AI attack techniques at their systems, spanning jailbreaks, prompt injection and agent-specific methods. Targets include AI models, the reasoning loops agents follow, applications and MCP servers. Each finding is given a severity ranking, aligned with frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and MITRE ATLAS, and passed to CrowdStrike's Falcon Guardian product as policy recommendations. Dreadnode-based testing is expected to become generally available in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, and the team will join CrowdStrike's Cyber Superintelligence Lab.
The announcements also brought a new AI Kill Switch within Falcon Guardian: authorised administrators can stop an agent that is misbehaving, block it from starting again and sever its network connections. The purchases continue a busy run: in January CrowdStrike agreed deals for identity security firm SGNL at $740 million and browser security company Seraphic at a reported $420 million, and in September 2025 it agreed to acquire AI security firm Pangea.