8 US cybersecurity giants each bought an AI-native firewall startup in two years
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-10-21
- Cisco, Palo Alto, Tenable, SentinelOne, F5, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Fortinet have each acquired an AI-native firewall company over the past two years.
- Headline deal prices often ran into hundreds of millions, but per SEC filings every verifiable figure is lower than the press number — the cheapest at just $40.6M. The takeaway: the giants were paying for teams, not businesses.
- Presented as a 4-minute Chinese-language video with AI-generated voiceover and animation; press prices from media reports, annualized figures from SEC filings.
More from Venture
- Do 50GW of AI compute need $10T ARR? A DeepSeek-pricing back-of-envelope debate — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-21
- What Would a High-Margin LLM Business Look Like When Everyone Bills by Token? — WholeOrganization915 · 2026-10-21
- Confidential Inference quietly grows as onchain AI workloads demand privacy — 0xJeff · 2026-10-21
- YC-Backed Manufacturing Startup Nox Metals Hits $25M Annualized Revenue in Under a Year — ycombinator · 2026-10-21
- Nvidia's $12.9B Hugging Face acquisition is its largest ever — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-21
- Why OpenRouter is worth $7.5B: a 5.5% toll on every model API call — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-21