Darktrace Goes Dutch with £39m Cybersprint Acquisition

"With this acquisition, we are able to leverage Cybersprint's seven years of R&D to accelerate our Prevent product family..."

It’s not a marathon, it’s a Cybersprint. Darktrace will acquire Dutch cybersecurity firm Cybersprint for €47.5 million (£39.4 million).

Cybersprint, which is based in The Hague, is an attack surface management company that provides real-time insights. It has 37 employees listed on LinkedIn. ING is listed as a customer on Cybersprint’s website.

“Bringing inside-out and outside-in visibility together is critical and having access to the robust, rich, real-time external dataset combined with Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI means that customers get a holistic view of prioritised cyber risks to harden the parts of their organisation that are most vulnerable. With this acquisition, we are able to leverage Cybersprint’s seven years of R&D to accelerate our Prevent product family, ultimately making it much harder for cyber-attackers to carry out successful missions,” says Poppy Gustafsson, CEO, Darktrace.

Through this acquisition, Darktrace gains a second European R&D Centre, joining forces with its Cambridge-based mathematicians and software engineers. It’s not clear if there are any job cuts as part of the acquisition.

Darktrace says the €47.5 million sum will be paid approximately 75% in cash and 25% in equity, valuing the transaction at approximately 12.5 times Cybersprint’s annual recurring revenue (ARR). With an expected completion date of on or around 1 March 2022, Cybersprint’s results of operations are not expected to be material to Darktrace’s results for the remainder of FY 2022.

According to Darktrace, Cybersprint’s attack surface management data can “enrich” its existing Detect and Respond products with external vulnerability data and help the company’s market entry into new areas like proactive AI cybersecurity.

In other news, Darktrace has had a busy month. It didn’t reveal names – a common tactic it uses – but a semiconductor company has renewed its contract in a “multi-million-dollar deal”. There were also deals with a multinational electronics corporation and a global airline.

Back in November, the British-American cybersecurity AI company disclosed a rise in revenue.

In its FY2021 results, Darktrace said its YoY revenue grew 41% alongside a revenue CAGR of 52% from 2018 to 2021. This financial profile was “bolstered” by $343 million (£257 million) of ARR and a revenue number for FY2021 of $281 million (£210.5 million).

Darktrace is headquartered in Cambridge (UK) and San Francisco.

Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton is the Editor of eWeek UK. He has 18 years' journalism and writing experience. His career has taken him to China, Japan and the UK - covering tech, fintech and business. Follow on Twitter @TonyFintech.
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