F5 acquires cloud security startup Threat Stack for $68 million

Applications networking company F5 has announced it’s acquiring Threat Stack, a Boston-based cloud security and compliance startup, for $68 million.

The deal, which comes months after F5 bought multi-cloud management startup Volterra for $500 million, sees the 25-year-old company looking to bolster its cloud security portfolio as applications become a growing focus for cybercriminals. Businesses lose more than $100 billion a year to attacks targeting digital experiences, F5 says and these experiences are increasingly powered by applications distributed across multiple environments and interconnected through APIs.

Threat Stack, which was founded in November 2012 and has since amassed more than $70 million across six funding rounds including a $45 million Series C round led by F-Prime Capital Partners and Eight Roads Ventures, specializes in cloud security for applications and provides customers with real-time threat detection for cloud infrastructure and workloads. Unlike many cloud security tools that kick in after an intrusion, Threat Stack takes a more proactive approach, alerting organizations to all known vulnerabilities and providing a report on the holes that need to be plugged.

The startup’s intrusion detection platform, the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform, works across cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and containerized environments, and is perhaps best known for its Slack integration that alerts DevOps teams to security concerns in real-time. Threat Stack has a number of big-name customers, according to its website, including Glassdoor, Ping Identity and Proofpoint.

F5 says that integrating its application and API protection solutions with Threat Stack’s cloud security capabilities and expertise will enhance visibility across application infrastructure and workloads, making it easier for customers to adopt consistent security in any cloud.

“Applications are the backbone of today’s modern businesses, and protecting them is mission-critical for our customers,” said Haiyan Song, EVP of Security at F5. “Threat Stack brings technology and talent that will strengthen F5’s security capabilities and further our adaptive applications vision with broader cloud observability and actionable security insights for customers.”

The acquisition, which is expected to close in F5’s first-quarter fiscal year 2022, is subject to closing conditions.