CrowdStrike announced agreements on Tuesday to acquire Fiddler AI, which specializes in monitoring AI agents, and Dreadnode, which specializes in offensive AI security testing. The two deals would together be worth $495 million, according to press reports, as the group did not disclose its financial terms.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which revealed the deals ahead of their official announcement, the group would pay around $400 million for Fiddler and around $95 million for Dreadnode.
CrowdStrike states that both acquisitions will be settled primarily in cash, with a portion in stock subject to vesting conditions. The closings are expected in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2027, which ends on January 31, 2027.
Fiddler AI, Agent Monitoring
Founded in 2018 and based in Palo Alto, California, Fiddler announced a $30 million Series C funding round in January, bringing its total funding to $100 million. Its technology monitors AI agents, those programs capable of autonomously chaining actions, and explains the decisions they make.
According to CrowdStrike, Fiddler will add agent evaluation prior to deployment, tracing of their reasoning and tool calls, as well as detection of behavioral drift and hallucinations (incorrect answers presented as true) in production. The solution will also record agent activity for compliance audits and track their consumption of tokens, the units of text processed by a model, as well as their expenses. The group plans to market this technology under the name Falcon Observe.
Dreadnode and Simulated Attacks
Founded in 2023, Dreadnode develops offensive AI security tools, meaning tests that simulate attacks against AI systems. The startup raised $14 million in a Series A round in early 2025.
According to CrowdStrike, the platform allows the user to describe in plain language what they want to test, then launches over 100 known attack strategies, including jailbreaks (bypassing a model’s safeguards), prompt injections, and multi-turn or agent-specific attacks. The tests target AI models, agent reasoning loops, applications, and MCP servers, a protocol that connects agents to external tools.
Results are ranked by severity, linked to frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS, and the NIST AI RMF, and then fed into CrowdStrike’s Falcon Guardian product as policy recommendations. The Dreadnode team, led by its CEO Brad Palm, is set to join CrowdStrike’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab. The testing capabilities from Dreadnode are expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2027.
Alongside these acquisitions, CrowdStrike has introduced an ‘AI Kill Switch’ into Falcon Guardian, which allows authorized administrators to stop a malfunctioning AI agent, prevent it from restarting, and cut off its network access.
The group has multiplied its security acquisitions over the past year. In January, it announced the acquisition of identity security company SGNL for $740 million, and browser security company Seraphic for a reported $420 million. In September 2025, CrowdStrike had also agreed to acquire Pangea, which specializes in AI security.
