CrowdStrike acquired Pangea for $260 million this week in a bid to define the next major security standard. A decade ago, the company was one among the pioneers of endpoint detection and response (EDR), which became the model for protecting devices. Now CrowdStrike wants to do the same for artificial intelligence, coining “AI Detection and Response”. “With Pangea, CrowdStrike will secure the entire AI lifecycle, detecting risks, enforcing safeguards, and ensuring compliance, so our customers can confidently build, deploy, and scale AI without risk,” said George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike.
As enterprises adopt generative AI tools and deploy autonomous agents, every interaction creates a potential vulnerability. “AI is rewriting the enterprise attack surface at breakneck speed. Each prompt becomes an entry point for the adversary,” Kurtz said. Pangea, founded in 2021, specializes in protecting AI applications at the interaction layer, the prompts and responses where attackers look for openings.
Pangea’s technology is designed to stop prompt injection attacks, jailbreak attempts, and data leakage before they cause damage. It also allows enterprises to govern how employees interact with AI systems. Oliver Friedrichs, Pangea’s founder and CEO, explained the mission: “Pangea was founded to make AI adoption safe and secure, giving enterprises the visibility and guardrails to embrace AI with confidence.” By pulling these capabilities into Falcon, CrowdStrike looks to position itself as the company that can protect AI use from development to deployment.
This approach contrasts with the strategies of larger competitors. Palo Alto Networks is spending $25 billion to acquire CyberArk. Check Point announced its acquisition of Lakera, another AI security firm, on the same day CrowdStrike revealed the Pangea deal. Google paid $32 billion for Wiz to strengthen cloud security. These are massive bets. CrowdStrike’s strategy is smaller, focused acquisitions that can be tightly integrated. Kurtz described to SiliconANGLE: “Our philosophy is long-term thinking. Customers don’t want four platforms. Ultimately, when companies acquire too much, it is digital taxidermy – it looks alive, but it’s Frankenstein underneath.”
The integration process is part of the appeal for customers. CrowdStrike’s Falcon Flex licensing model allows enterprises to switch on new modules without separate procurement cycles. “As soon as the deal is closed, it’ll be on the price book. You don’t have to wait months,” Kurtz said. That immediacy reassures customers who want fewer vendors but also want acquisitions to work seamlessly.
The acquisition also connects to CrowdStrike’s broader vision of an “Agentic SOC,” or security operations center powered by fleets of AI agents. “It used to be weeks, then days, then hours and minutes, now and seconds,” Kurtz said. “The SOC analyst is overloaded with alerts. There is too much coming in, and there is not enough time to get through this at the speed at which the adversary is operating.”
CrowdStrike’s response is to automate much of the work analysts do today. “One day we are going to have an autonomous SOC analyst doing the work of the analyst, controlled by the human as a fleet of agents,” Kurtz said. These digital employees will triage alerts, investigate incidents, and remediate threats at machine speed, while humans supervise. But these same agents also introduce new risks if manipulated. For CrowdStrike, that is where Pangea fits: securing the interaction layer so AI agents cannot be tricked into exposing data or executing unsafe commands.
Data is another critical piece of the story behind the acquisition. CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform processes trillions of telemetry events every day, annotated by its threat hunters and incident response teams. “You cannot build large language models without the correct data,” Kurtz said to SiliconANGLE. “Our data is enriched with the customer’s own information, and now they can build in one spot with all the relevant data on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform.”
Investors and analysts see the logic. After Fal.Con 2025, where the deal was announced, CrowdStrike stock jumped nearly 13 percent. Wells Fargo analyst Andrew Nowinski wrote that “the plethora of AI-based solutions announced today will further separate CrowdStrike from the competition.” For an industry where rivals like Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and SentinelOne are all racing to prove they can secure AI systems, that momentum matters.
Kurtz, however, insists the motivation is not simply to beat competitors. “If we are the first to provide a fully autonomous SOC analyst, that is the win,” he said. “We have got the right data set, the right people, the right focus.”
