Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity player CrowdStrike says it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SGNL to ensure identity security for the AI era.
The acquisition is designed to secure CrowdStrike’s leadership in identity security in the AI era, “enabling access for human, non-human (NHI), and AI identities” to be continuously granted and revoked based on real-time risk, and setting a “new standard for agentic identity security”.
“AI agents operate with superhuman speed and access, making every agent a privileged identity that must be protected,” said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike.
“With SGNL, CrowdStrike will deliver continuous, real-time access control that eliminates the known and unknown gaps from legacy standing privileges. We’re disrupting the premise of modern privilege and access – for every identity, human or machine. This is identity security built for the AI era.”
CrowdStrike said identity security was rapidly becoming one of cybersecurity’s largest and fastest-growing segments, citing IDC’s forecast that the identity security market will grow from approximately $29bn in 2025 to $56bn by 2029.
Identity security for the AI era requires a fundamentally different approach, said CrowdStrike, built on continuous risk evaluation and dynamic authorisation across modern access paths. It described SGNL as “the runtime access enforcement layer between modern identity providers and the SaaS and hyperscaler resources that people, NHIs and AI agents access”.
Powered by CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform, SGNL will continuously evaluate identity, device and behaviour “to dynamically grant, deny or revoke access as conditions change, eliminating standing privilege access across every identity and environment”, according to CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike said this would be a mainly cash deal with a portion to be delivered in the form of stock, subject to vesting conditions. The proposed acquisition should close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to the usual closing conditions, such as regulatory clearance.
A leading cybersecurity player, CrowdStrike has spent the last 18 months recovering from a major reputational hit back in 2024 when its software update caused arguably the worst IT outage in history. One in four Fortune 500 companies were thought to have been impacted. The outage, which occurred on 19 July 2024, quickly grew into a global crisis, with various sectors – most notably airlines, banks and healthcare – being severely disrupted as Microsoft computer systems shut down.
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