CrowdStrike said on January 8, 2026, that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire SGNL, a Palo Alto, California, startup that sells what it calls Continuous Identity: software that grants and removes access to business systems in real time based on risk. The cybersecurity company plans to fold SGNL into the identity security products on its Falcon platform.
CrowdStrike did not put a price on the deal in its announcement. Chief executive George Kurtz told CNBC that the transaction was valued at nearly $740 million, according to CyberScoop and other outlets. CrowdStrike said the price would be paid predominantly in cash, with a portion delivered in CrowdStrike stock subject to vesting conditions.
The acquisition is expected to close during CrowdStrike's first quarter of fiscal 2027, subject to customary conditions including regulatory clearances. SGNL co-founder and chief executive Scott Kriz said joining CrowdStrike would give the company global scale.
What SGNL built
SGNL describes its product as a runtime enforcement layer that sits between identity providers, such as Okta or Microsoft Entra ID, and the SaaS applications and cloud resources that people, machine accounts and AI agents use. Instead of giving a user or service a permission that stays in place until someone removes it, the software evaluates identity, device and behaviour continuously and grants, denies or revokes access as conditions change.
The approach targets so-called standing privileges, the long-lived access rights that attackers can exploit once they compromise an account. When SGNL raised its Series A in February 2025, SecurityWeek described its product as an identity-first system that removes static credentials and gives employees, contractors and partners access only while they need it.
Under CrowdStrike, SGNL's enforcement will be driven by risk signals from the Falcon platform. CrowdStrike said the combination would extend its just-in-time access controls beyond Active Directory and Entra ID to AWS IAM, Okta and other cloud identity and SaaS systems, and would use the Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol (CAEP) to revoke access downstream of the identity provider.
“AI agents operate with superhuman speed and access, making every agent a privileged identity that must be protected”
Why CrowdStrike is buying
CrowdStrike framed the deal around AI agents and other non-human identities, which it said now operate as high-privilege accounts with access to data, applications, compute and other agents. In its view, access models built on static policies cannot reassess risk quickly enough when those identities act on their own.
Kurtz said every AI agent had become a privileged identity that must be protected, and that SGNL would let CrowdStrike deliver continuous, real-time access control for every identity, human or machine. The company cited IDC figures projecting that the identity security market would grow from about $29 billion in 2025 to $56 billion by 2029.
Identity is already one of CrowdStrike's product lines. Its Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security offering covers privileged access management, identity threat detection and response, SaaS identity security and agentic identity protection. SGNL adds the authorization step that decides, request by request, whether access should continue.
The founders and the funding
SGNL was founded in 2021 and is based in Palo Alto. Scott Kriz is its co-founder and chief executive. In announcing the deal, he said the company had been founded to connect access decisions with business reality.
In February 2025 the company raised a $30 million Series A led by Brightmind Partners, with Costanoa Ventures, Microsoft's venture fund M12 and Cisco Investments also taking part. That round brought SGNL's total funding to $42 million, according to SecurityWeek. At the reported price, CrowdStrike is paying more than 17 times the capital SGNL raised.
Neither company disclosed how many people work at SGNL or what its revenue was.
A busy market for identity and AI security
The deal adds to a run of security acquisitions tied to AI. CyberScoop noted recent deals by Palo Alto Networks for Chronosphere, Zscaler for SplxAI, Veeam for Securiti AI and Check Point for Lakera, as larger vendors buy their way into protecting AI systems and the identities they use.
For SGNL's customers, CrowdStrike said its features would become part of the Falcon platform, alongside the company's existing endpoint, cloud and identity products. It did not say whether SGNL would continue to be sold as a separate product after the deal closes.
