Darktrace snaps up Dutch Cybersprint to drive preventative cyber attack approach

Tech darling Darktrace announced that it has snapped up Cybersprint, an attack surface management company, for €47.5m (£39.6m), valuing the transaction 12.5 times Cybersprint’s annual recurring revenue.

The acquisition of Dutch firm Cybersprint, which provides continuous, real-time insights from an outside-in perspective to eliminate blind spots and detect risks, is aligned with Darktrace’s vision of delivering a ‘Continuous Cyber AI Loop’ and complements its Self-Learning technology and inside-out view.

Through this acquisition, the British tech company gains a second European R&D Centre in The Hague, Netherlands, joining forces with its world-class, Cambridge-based mathematicians and software engineers. Cybersprint’s employees bring an understanding of how to continuously model real-time internet data as well as ethical hacking expertise.

Cybersprint’s attack surface management data will also expand existing Darktrace Detect and Respond products with external vulnerability data and accelerate the company’s market entry into new areas like proactive AI cyber security.

For example, this capability will be introduced as a new module in the Prevent product family, feeding organisation-specific web data to Darktrace’s Attack Path Modeling technology.

“We are very excited to welcome the Cybersprint team to Darktrace. 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,” said Poppy Gustafsson, chief exec, Darktrace.

“I’m very excited about this fantastic step in the journey of Cybersprint. We are passionate about automating manual tasks in cybersecurity from an outside perspective. We believe attackers never sleep and operate without scope. When we began conversations with Darktrace, we felt an instant connection on vision, culture and technology. That’s why we are looking forward to joining Darktrace and working together to accelerate state-of-the-art innovations to make organisations more cyber secure,” commented Pieter Jansen, chief exec, Cybersprint.

The expected completion date is March 1.