M&A: The art of the deal

The Tech Panda takes a look at recent mergers and acquisitions within various tech ecosystems and what that means for industry.

Cybersecurity: CrowdStrike will acquire Flow Security

CrowdStrike will acquire Flow Security, the industry’s first and only cloud data runtime security solution. With this acquisition, CrowdStrike is setting the standard for modern cloud security with comprehensive real-time data protection spanning endpoint and cloud environments, delivering the only cloud data protection platform that secures data in all states, both at rest and in motion.

“CrowdStrike was born in the cloud and pioneered cloud-native cybersecurity. We have been consistently recognized as the strategic leader in cloud security by delivering the outcomes customers need most from a single, unified platform,” said George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. “With the acquisition of Flow Security, we’re expanding our cloud leadership by protecting data in all states as it flows through the cloud, and are redefining the future of data protection by securing data from code, to application, to device and cloud.”

“Since our founding, Flow Security has focused on removing the complexity of securing the massive amounts of critical data businesses manage daily. We saw that the market lacked a solution that provided comprehensive protection of the flow of data as it traversed SaaS applications, on-prem, cloud infrastructure, third-party APIs, etc., and that this lack of visibility and control presented a critical risk to the enterprise,” said Jonathan Roizin, CEO of Flow Security. “We look forward to working with the cloud security leader, CrowdStrike, to bring to market the most extensive cloud data protection solution.”

Why It Matters

An organization’s most critical information remains the primary target of the adversary. As businesses use more data than ever, the growing reliance on cloud has led to the distribution of data across cloud-based services, third-party APIs and GenAI applications. Adversaries are increasingly becoming adept at exploiting the gaps created by stitched together platforms and cloud point-products to target and steal sensitive data. Stopping breaches requires a unified security platform that natively protects data at rest and in motion as it flows through the cloud, on-prem and within applications.

With the acquisition of Flow Security and by bringing data security posture management (DSPM) to the CrowdStrike Falcon® XDR platform, CrowdStrike is setting a new standard for modern cloud security with data security innovations that discover, classify, and protect data in all states from the risk of exposure, wherever it moves or resides.

With the acquisition of Flow Security, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform is poised to become the industry’s most comprehensive data security platform. Following the closing of the acquisition, CrowdStrike plans to fully deliver native Flow Security DSPM capabilities in Falcon Cloud Security as part of the Falcon XDR platform, enabling customers to consolidate cloud point solutions and protect the entire cloud estate. Through this, CrowdStrike will provide visibility into critical cloud data flows, insight into how data interacts with applications, and the ability to detect when sensitive data is at risk or unintentionally leaving an environment.

Fintech: Mitgo Group is acquiring UAE-based Embedded

MarTech company Mitgo Group is acquiring UAE-based embedded finance platform Embedded, whose team has extensive experience in fintech and will complement Mitgo’ s technology stack needed to enter a new market.

“On top of other viable opportunities, our future partners from the financial industry will get both an excellent test site on the basis of a new market and a vast system of distribution of financial products among the audience of publishers: cashback-services, media buyers, loyalty programmes, BNPL services and many others. With our help, they will be able to offer a suitable set of solutions to hundreds of millions of their users around the world”, states Neha Kulwal, Managing Director, APAC and India, Mitgo.

“The entire world, including global players in the financial market and international organizations such as the UN and World Bank, work to empower SMBs and make financial services more accessible for them. Embedded finance solutions help the market to grow not just from the top-down approach when a bank offers pre-defined products to the clients, but also from the bottom-up when the industries themselves use financial products to solve the needs and the problems in their core business. I believe, together with Mitgo Group, we will not just change the way the MarTech industry uses financial products but introduce revolutionary solutions that will change the whole market”, states Oleg Chanchikov, CEO and founder of Embedded.

Why It Matters

The Group is launching a new cutting-edge business division – fintech services for affiliate publishers. According to conservative estimates, affiliate marketing spend reached $14.4 billion

in 2023 and will exceed $15.7 billion this year. Additionally, the spend of affiliate marketing in India is projected to increase from 331 million to more than 420 million by 2025. In the next three years, Mitgo plans to become a conduit for more than 5-7% of that transaction volume. This acquisition is the first step in this direction.

The new division will include a set of solutions from the field of embedded finance. It will allow millions of publishers across the globe, including US and Europe, with a specific focus on currently underbanked audiences in APAC, MENA and LATAM regions to withdraw their earnings instantly instead of the standard waiting period of 60-120 days (that currently is a benchmark in affiliate marketing). They will also get access to loans, reduce transaction costs, reduce exchange commissions, improve transaction speed and get many other benefits.

Cybersecurity: Zscaler, Inc. acquires Avalor

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), the leader in cloud security, announced another major leap forward in artificial intelligence (AI) innovations that extends the Zscaler Zero Trust ExchangeTM data, from more than 400 billion daily Zscaler transactions with Avalor’s Data Fabric for Security with over 150 pre-built integrations enabling customers to proactively identify and predict critical vulnerabilities as well as improve operational efficiencies. By leveraging its massive data foundation, Zscaler is poised to transform the AI capabilities for the cybersecurity industry to not only enable organizations to mitigate risks and optimize performance but also pave the way for zero-touch operations.

“AI is only as good as the underlying data, and many solutions lack the additional context and knowledge from data sources across the enterprise to truly leverage security specific AI models,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO, Chairman, and Founder of Zscaler. “Zscaler operates the world’s largest security cloud with the most relevant data to train security specific large language models (LLMs) and with the Avalor acquisition, we can more effectively identify vulnerabilities, while predicting and preventing breaches.”

“We have long understood that being able to make sense of all the disparate security data sources in an organization is essential to understanding and improving risk posture, that’s why we delivered the industry’s first Data Fabric for Security to provide that aggregated platform,” said Raanan Raz, co-founder and CEO, Avalor. “The first application running on our Data Fabric is our Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) module.  By combining the Zscaler proprietary data sets with the 150 third-party sources Avalor supports, we will be in a prime position to enhance our UVM capabilities and create new applications with additional cyber protection insights.”

Why It Matters

The rapid advancement of AI will have pivotal impacts to the cybersecurity industry and to effectively combat AI-led threats, organizations must fully harness their currently isolated security data at massive scale. Zscaler’s 16 years of leadership operating the world’s largest cloud security platform has allowed it to leverage a massive data set to develop its pioneering AI-driven solutions, including Zscaler Risk360 and Zscaler Business Insights, which set a new benchmark for proactive cybersecurity and business intelligence.

Design & technology: Naxnova Acquires Quad Industries Belgium

Naxnova (formerly known as Classic Stripes), a design & technology company, announced the acquisition of Quad Industries Belgium, a player in the printed electronics sector today for INR 90 crores (approx. Euro 10 Mn). Naxnova has acquired 74% stake from the current shareholders of Quad Industries and the balance stake shall be acquired in a phased manner making the transaction a 100% share purchase deal over the next few quarters.

Salil Musale, Managing Director of Naxnova, said, “This transaction perfectly aligns with our growth strategy not just worldwide but immediately in the Indian market as our new offerings will replace old technology products in consumer durables market and in the 2 wheeler and 4 wheeler segment. This will help us increase our market share and revenue from Indian operations exponentially going forward.”

Why It Matters

Established in 1998, Quad Industries Belgium has garnered a strong reputation for its next generation technology in developing and manufacturing user interfaces and other printed solutions for the medical, wearables, consumer goods & automotive sector in the European Union. This acquisition brings together the complementary capabilities of Naxnova and Quad Industries Belgium, enabling the combined entity to offer a broader range of next generation products, particularly in the automotive, consumer goods, and healthcare sectors. Led by Arne and Ruben Castleyn, Quad Industries has a well-established development and manufacturing facility located in Belgium and Slovakia.  In the past few years, Quad expanded its activities in the field of printed electronics even further so that we can now also provide these sectors with innovative, flexible sensor solutions.

Cloud: Cloudflare acquires Baselime

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the connectivity cloud company entered the observability market with the acquisition of Baselime, the cloud-native observability platform. By integrating Baselime’s technology with Cloudflare’s developer platform, Cloudflare will be uniquely positioned to bring deep knowledge of serverless platforms and developer experience together to solve the challenges of observability for serverless apps.

“Two million developers building on Cloudflare trust us to help scale their apps globally, but can still struggle to understand the behavior of their cloud applications,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “We believe that to be the leading developer platform, having the best observability tools built in is going to be table-stakes. Baselime has raised the standard for serverless observability and we can further unlock those insights for every developer building on our platform.”

Why It Matters

Today, entire applications are built on serverless architectures, from compute to databases, storage, queues, and more. Still, observability is often regarded as one of the weaknesses of serverless architectures — trading off visibility into the application’s behavior for scalable infrastructure that doesn’t need to be managed. Building and debugging production applications requires the ability to understand trends and patterns, identify performance bottlenecks, and isolate errors to ensure ongoing reliability, scalability, and security. Having access to this level of visibility, preferably all within one platform, is a critical factor developers consider when choosing a platform on which to build.

With this acquisition, Cloudflare enters into the observability market to further enable developers to deploy services in production — allowing teams to identify when a release has gone wrong and needs to be rolled back, investigate bugs and regressions, optimize performance, and more. Developers will also benefit from the ability to optimize the cost of their serverless applications, by understanding the rate of requests made and analyzing sources of latency.

With this acquisition, Baselime will be integrated into Cloudflare’s developer platform, helping developers push the boundaries of modern observability to:

? Analyze their observability data across thousands of possible fields and values, to surface all errors, requests, or performance issues for specific users or across their entire applications.

? Enable and adopt OpenTelemetry-based tools and standards to facilitate integration with a diverse set of application frameworks and cloud providers. These tools and standards enable developers to easily and consistently instrument their applications for rich observability data, making it easier to quickly troubleshoot issues, whether they impact a single user, a subset of users or the entire application.

? Extract insights from their observability data thanks to a suite of developer experience improvements, including real-time error tracking based on logs and traces, actionable alerts, trace diagrams and timelines, an approachable query engine, and an AI debugging assistant.