CrowdStrike has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dreadnode, a startup that builds automated security testing for AI models, applications and agents. The company announced the deal on November 3, 2026, during its Fal.Con Europe conference in Barcelona, alongside a separate agreement to buy the AI observability company Fiddler AI.
CrowdStrike did not disclose terms. CyberScoop, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported that the deal is worth about $95 million. CrowdStrike said it will pay mostly in cash, with a portion in stock subject to vesting, and expects to close in the fourth quarter of its 2027 fiscal year.
Once the deal closes, Dreadnode's team will join CrowdStrike's Cyber Superintelligence Lab, its leaders wrote in a blog post. CrowdStrike plans to make the startup's automated AI security testing generally available on its Falcon platform in the same quarter.
What Dreadnode built
Dreadnode's software probes AI systems for weaknesses before they are deployed. According to CrowdStrike, it runs more than 100 known attack methods against models and agents, including jailbreaks and prompt injection, scans models and their components, and ranks what it finds by severity. Findings are mapped to frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for large language models, MITRE ATLAS and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and people can review the results.
The company's website describes it as AI infrastructure for cybersecurity, with modules for operations, agent intelligence, evaluations and observability, and tools for AI red teaming, web security and network operations. Earlier products included Crucible, a sandbox for practising attacks on AI, Strikes, a training environment for AI agents, and Spyglass, which red-teams deployed AI applications, FinTech Global reported in 2025.
Dreadnode also put out research and open tools. Its blog lists the AIRTBench, PentestJudge and ScopeBench benchmarks, the DreadIndex, and the open-source projects Ares and DreadGOAD. In their post, chief executive Brad Palm and Nick Landers wrote that the team had spent three years building attack agents, shipped Dreadnode 2.0 and helped run the first Offensive AI Con. They said they had always run the company like a lab.
“Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can prove it is secure.”
Why CrowdStrike is buying
CrowdStrike said Dreadnode's test results will feed into Falcon Guardian, its product for protecting AI agents, as policy recommendations, and that the testing data will improve its own SafeMind models.
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike's chief executive, said companies are putting AI into use before they can show it is secure, and that most find flaws only once the AI is in production. Palm said in the release that traditional testing was not built to catch the ways AI fails, and that the people best placed to find those failures think like attackers.
In the blog post, Palm and Landers described the deal as a call-up to the big leagues rather than an exit.
The founders and the funding
Dreadnode was co-founded by Will Pearce, who previously led an AI red team at NVIDIA, and Nick Landers, a former vice president of research at the security firm NetSPI, according to FinTech Global. Palm is now chief executive and is quoted in the release as one of the founders.
In February 2025 the company raised a $14 million Series A from investors including Decibel, Next Frontier Capital, In-Q-Tel, Sands Capital and Indie VC, FinTech Global reported. The blog post also names Aviso among its backers. CrowdStrike did not say where Dreadnode is based or how many people work there.
A busy week for AI security
The two Barcelona deals add up to almost $500 million in reported value, though CrowdStrike confirmed neither price. Fiddler, valued at about $400 million by the Journal, records and explains what AI agents do; Dreadnode attacks them before they ship.
Together they show CrowdStrike moving to cover AI from testing through to production, as more companies let agents write code, use internal tools and handle sensitive data.
For Dreadnode's customers, the plan is for its testing to be part of the Falcon platform rather than a separate product. CrowdStrike has not said what will happen to Dreadnode's standalone platform or its open-source tools once the deal closes, or whether the startup's brand will remain.
