Palo Alto Networks is shopping for Cider Safety for as much as $300M • TechCrunch

Extra consolidation is afoot on the earth of cyber safety. TechCrunch has realized from sources that Palo Alto Networks goes to be saying the acquisition of Cider Safety for $200 million in money and an additional $100 million in shares. The deal has been rumored for weeks, however we perceive that buyers have now been knowledgeable, and employees can also be being looped in on the deal, which can be made official when Palo Alto studies its earnings later at present.

Palo Alto has not responded to our request for remark.

Cider Safety, based mostly out of Israel, is one in all quite a lot of firms that focuses on utility safety, which incorporates not simply know-how to watch malicious or suspicious exercise round reside purposes within the cloud, however observability of the complete ecosystem round these purposes, particularly code deployments and different kinds of modifications and updates, masking code, CI/CD and the broader provide chain round these apps.

The corporate had raised $44 million from buyers that included Tiger World and Glilot Capital Companions — representing an honest exit for them at a time when valuations are seeing lots of strain, and lots of buyers (together with Tiger) have made drastic mark-downs in a few of their holdings.

That’s to not say that costs are buoyant right here: one supply tells us that Palo Alto might effectively publicize this as a $200 million money deal, with the $100 million share half disclosed later so as to not alarm the market.

Palo Alto Networks at present has a market cap of near $47 billion. Comparatively talking, whereas it has been hit, like different tech firms, by a dropping share worth, it has seen considerably much less volatility and decline than a few of its extra priceless, greater, consumer-facing counterparts. The corporate has made quite a lot of acquisitions over time to increase its attain available in the market, however this seems to be the primary and just one in 2022 (the 2 most up-to-date earlier than this are Expanse and BridgeCrew, respectively for $800 million in 2020 and $156 million in 2021).

Palo Alto already has a division that focuses on utility safety, which was partly fashioned by means of acquisitions. Evident.io, which it acquired in 2018 for $300 million, varieties the premise of its Prisma Cloud enterprise, which is targeted on end-to-end utility safety. Cider will deliver Palo Alto a product constructed from the bottom up envisioning extra holistic observability and communication between engineers and safety groups.

Notably, together with the rumors of this Cider deal, it had been reported that Palo Alto Networks had been eyeing up one other utility safety startup, Apiiro Safety; nevertheless, studies declare that PA “walked away” attributable to a a lot greater price ticket of $600 million. Apparently, Apiiro appears to be like like it’s set to go it alone for now: simply earlier this month, it introduced a $100 million spherical of funding.

Cloud safety, and utility safety particularly, proceed to be scorching areas within the enterprise IT world, not least as a result of the excessive quantity of community exercise and programs publicity each make the house susceptible to assaults. It was estimated to be a market value some $6.2 billion in 2020, and it’s rising quick.

We are going to upate this submit as we study extra.