SentinelOne To Buy Identity Firm Attivo Networks For $616.5M

‘For Attivo, this acquisition is not an exit. Joining forces with SentinelOne is just the opposite: an opportunity to continue on Attivo’s current path without slowing down,’ says CEO Tushar Kothari.

SentinelOne has agreed to purchase Attivo Networks to extend the company’s artificial intelligence-powered prevention, detection and response capabilities to identity-based threats.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based endpoint security vendor said its proposed acquisition of Fremont, Calif.-based Attivo Networks will allow SentinelOne to extend identity threat detection and response, identity infrastructure assessment and identity cyber deception to its Singularity platform. SentinelOne will pay $616.5 million for Attivo, and the deal is expected to close in the fiscal quarter ending July 31.

“Identity fuses together all enterprise assets, and I see identity threat detection and response as an integral part of our XDR vision,” SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten said in a statement. “Attivo Networks is the right technology and team to advance our portfolio, completing our hypergrowth and accelerating enterprise zero-trust adoption.”

[Related: SentinelOne To Buy Data Analytics Firm Scalyr For $155 Million]

The deal comes 18 months after rival CrowdStrike bought access control and threat prevention startup Preempt Security for $96 million to help customers protect identity data without compromising productivity or the user experience. CrowdStrike today has identity threat protection and identity threat detection modules, while SentinelOne didn’t have any identity security offerings prior to the Attivo Networks buy.

Attivo Networks was founded in 2011, employs 228 people and has raised $60.1 million of outside funding, according to LinkedIn and Crunchbase. The company most recently closed a $10.7 million Series C round in June 2019 led by Energy Impact Partners, according to Crunchbase. SentinelOne’s stock is down $0.14 (0.47 percent) to $29.41 per share in pre-market trading Tuesday.

“As the threat landscape evolves, identity remains the central nervous system of the enterprise,” Attivo Networks CEO Tushar Kothari said in a statement. “Combined with the power of SentinelOne’s autonomous XDR, we’ll bring real-time identity threat detection and response top the front lines of cyber defense.”

Attivo’s identity suite protects against credential theft, privilege escalation, lateral movement, data cloaking and identity exposure, supporting conditional access and zero-trust cybersecurity. The company’s identity assessment tool provides visibility into Active Directory misconfigurations, suspicious password and account changes, credential exposures and unauthorized access to reduce the attack surface.

The company’s claim to fame is its network and cloud-based deception suite, which SentinelOne said lures attackers into revealing themselves. Through misdirection of the attack with tactics including breadcrumbs and decoy accounts, files and IPs, customers using the deception platform gain the advantage of time to detect, analyze and stop attackers and insider threats without impacting enterprise assets.

“The shift to hybrid work and increased cloud adoption has established identity as the new perimeter, highlighting the importance of visibility into user activity,” SentinelOne COO Nicholas Warner said in a statement. “Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) is the missing link in holistic XDR and zero-trust strategies.”

SentinelOne and Attivo share a vision, passion and successful track record of providing customers with superior defenses to protect themselves from adversaries, Kothari wrote in a blog post Tuesday. The deal will create a wide range of new opportunities for Attivo’s employees, growing customer base, channel partner network and technology partners, according to Kothari.

“For Attivo, this acquisition is not an exit,” Kothari wrote in the blog. “Joining forces with SentinelOne is just the opposite: an opportunity to continue on Attivo’s current path without slowing down. In fact, as we continue to travel the road to XDR, we plan to hit the accelerator by taking advantage of the significant and growing market opportunities within our collective grasp.”

This is just SentinelOne’s second acquisition in the company’s 10-year history. The company in February 2021 scooped up data analytics tech developer Scalyr for $155 million to better ingest, correlate, search and act on data from any source.