CrowdStrike to Buy Fiddler AI and Dreadnode for Nearly $500 Million to Secure AI Agents

CrowdStrike is paying about $400 million for Fiddler AI and about $95 million for Dreadnode, according to The Wall Street Journal, as cited by TechCrunch. That brings the combined price to just under $500 million.

What The Two Companies Do

Fiddler AI makes observability software that tracks how AI agents behave inside companies. According to TechCrunch, it will become part of the Falcon platform as a product called Falcon Observe. Customers will use it to evaluate agents before deployment, follow what they do once they are running, and send that activity into CrowdStrike's wider platform as telemetry.

Dreadnode automates security testing aimed at finding weaknesses in AI models, applications and agents before they go live. Its software will be built into Falcon Guardian, CrowdStrike's detection and response product for agents, where test results will feed in as recommended security policies.

Fiddler AI was founded in 2018 and has raised about $99 million, while Dreadnode, founded in 2023, has raised $14 million, according to PitchBook figures cited by TechCrunch.

A Run of AI Security Deals

The acquisitions are the latest in a string of AI-related purchases by CrowdStrike. In September 2025 it announced a deal for Pangea, an AI security company, to add AI detection and response to Falcon, and in January this year it agreed to buy SGNL to extend its identity security to AI agents.

The new deals arrive during the same week that CrowdStrike said it was building Falcon Guardian protections into Anthropic's Claude Cowork, so security teams can watch and control Claude agents on Windows and Mac machines from the start.

Why It Matters

Companies are deploying AI agents faster than their security policies and processes are adapting. Employees are trying out AI tools, automating workflows and building their own apps with AI coding tools, all of which leaves security teams with new systems to track. A growing group of startups and established vendors argue that traditional security software was not designed to watch AI tools, the connectors that link them to company data, or how staff use them.

By buying monitoring and pre-deployment testing instead of building them, CrowdStrike is betting that its large installed base across enterprises and governments will let it sell agent security as part of the platform customers already run. For chief information security officers, the deals point to agent oversight being bundled into existing security suites rather than bought as separate tools.

The reports did not give a timeline for completing either deal or say whether regulatory approval is needed.