CrowdStrike: The cybersecurity firm you need to watch out for next year

As cyber threats and security breaches increasingly become commonplace, it lays fertile grounds for innovative cybersecurity firms. BlackBerry’s (BB) recent acquisition of Cylance for a whopping $1.4 billion underscores the fact that security chiefs of corporate giants are now putting a lot focus on data security.

Venture capitalists seem especially encouraged by this landscape and have shown immense interest in funding firms that have anything to do with data protection. Riding on this investor interest, numerous firms have also gone public, including Zscaler Inc (ZS) and Tenable Holdings (TENB) and Carbon Black (CBLK).

Among them is Sunnyvale, California- based CrowdStrike, a software-as-a-service endpoint protection company. The company specializes in analyzing user behavior in the various devices in the network, as uses this data to identify malicious interferences and cyber threats.

According to the company, its automated threat detection solution can come up with as many as 2.3 million decisions in a second’s time. It’s software, meanwhile, is claimed to have the capacity to successfully finish over 100 billion jobs in just a day.

CrowdStrike has played a key role in a few high-profile countermeasure operations, including that of 2016 e-mail leak of Democratic National Committee as well as the leakage of confidential data of Sony Pictures by hackers named “Guardians of Peace” in 2014.

Reuters had reported in October that the company had hired Goldman Sachs Group to prepare for its initial public offering, which is expected in the first half of 2019. However, CrowdStrike is tight-lipped about this move and has refused to comment on it so far.

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But if this turns out to be true, this could be one stock that you need to have a close watch on.

Earlier in June, the company had raised $200 million from various venture capitalists including Accel Partners and General Atlantic, taking its overall valuation to over $3 billion. Alphabet’s (GOOGL) investment arm Capital G is another major funding partner for CrowdStrike.

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