Breaking

FY2026 revenue $4.81B - up 22% year over year ARR ~$5.51B as of April 2026 4-for-1 stock split effective July 2, 2026 97% gross retention across the Falcon platform Founded 2011 by George Kurtz & team Nasdaq: CRWD · S&P 500 since 2024 FY2026 revenue $4.81B - up 22% year over year ARR ~$5.51B as of April 2026 4-for-1 stock split effective July 2, 2026 97% gross retention across the Falcon platform Founded 2011 by George Kurtz & team Nasdaq: CRWD · S&P 500 since 2024

Company Profile · Cybersecurity

CrowdStrike

The cloud-native security company that put one lightweight agent on millions of machines - and turned "we stop breaches" into a $4.8-billion business.

2011

Founded

$4.81B

FY26 Revenue

~$5.5B

Annual Rec. Revenue

CRWD

Nasdaq / S&P 500

CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. · Austin, Texas. The Falcon platform runs from the cloud, watching endpoints in real time.
Photograph-style logo mark, Vincent-Musi treatment - the falcon that became a household name after July 2024.

What It Does

Security, moved to the cloud

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company. Its core product, the Falcon platform, is built on an idea that sounded contrarian in 2011: the software that protects your computers should not live on your computers. It should live in the cloud, where it can see everything at once.

Instead of the heavy antivirus suites of the previous era, Falcon installs a single lightweight agent - a small program that streams activity from a device up to CrowdStrike's cloud. There, machine-learning models and human analysts compare that behavior against telemetry from millions of other endpoints. When one customer is attacked, the pattern is recognized and every other customer is protected. That is the "crowd" in CrowdStrike.

Over time the single agent grew into a platform. The same sensor now feeds endpoint detection, cloud-workload protection, identity security, threat intelligence and a security data lake, so an organization can consolidate tools it once bought from a dozen vendors.

We stop breaches. CrowdStrike's long-standing tagline

Customers & The Problem

Who uses it, and why

CrowdStrike's customers are the organizations that cannot afford to be the next breach in the news: large enterprises, banks, hospitals, manufacturers, retailers and governments, alongside a growing base of mid-market firms. Collectively they generate about $5.5 billion in annual recurring revenue, and the company reports a 97% gross retention rate - once organizations move onto Falcon, they tend to stay.

The problem it solves is deceptively simple to state and brutally hard to do: stop attackers before they cause damage. Modern breaches move in minutes, jump from a stolen password to cloud infrastructure to sensitive data, and hide inside legitimate tools. Traditional signature-based antivirus - which looks for known-bad files - misses attackers who use no files at all. Falcon watches behavior instead, so it can flag an attack it has never seen before.

PROBLEM 01

Fileless & novel attacks

Behavioral detection catches activity that signature scanners miss, including attacks that never write a file to disk.

PROBLEM 02

Too many tools

One agent replaces separate products for endpoint, cloud, identity and log management, cutting cost and blind spots.

PROBLEM 03

Slow response

Cloud analysis and managed threat hunting shrink the time between an intrusion and a human doing something about it.

PROBLEM 04

Identity attacks

Falcon Identity Protection watches for stolen credentials and lateral movement, a leading cause of major breaches.

The Founders

Built by insiders who left

CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 by three people who knew the security industry from the inside. George Kurtz had been the chief technology officer of McAfee; Dmitri Alperovitch was a well-known threat researcher; Gregg Marston handled the finances. The clearest view of what legacy antivirus could not do came from the people who had helped build it.

George Kurtz

Co-founder & CEO

Former McAfee CTO who set the cloud-first vision. Also a competitive endurance racer.

Dmitri Alperovitch

Co-founder & former CTO

Threat researcher known for attributing high-profile state-backed intrusions.

Gregg Marston

Co-founder & former CFO

Finance leader who helped stand up the early company and its funding.

Products & Services

One platform, many modules

Everything CrowdStrike sells runs on the same Falcon sensor. Customers switch on the modules they need, increasingly through a flexible subscription called Falcon Flex that lets them commit a budget and spend it across the platform - a model that drove more than a billion dollars of deal value in a single quarter.

2013

Falcon Platform

The cloud-native foundation delivered through a single lightweight agent.

2016

Falcon Insight (EDR/XDR)

Records and analyzes endpoint activity to detect and stop threats in real time.

2021

Falcon Cloud Security

Protects cloud workloads, containers and multi-cloud posture.

2020

Falcon Identity Protection

Detects credential theft and lateral movement across identities.

2024

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM

Security data lake for fast search and correlation of events.

2023

Charlotte AI

A generative-AI analyst that helps teams triage and investigate.

By The Numbers

The growth curve

Revenue has climbed steadily even through the fallout of the 2024 outage. The bars below show approximate total annual revenue by fiscal year.

FY2022

$1.45B

FY2023

$2.24B

FY2024

$3.06B

FY2025

$3.95B

FY2026

$4.81B

Approximate figures based on CrowdStrike fiscal-year reporting. Bars scaled to FY2026 = 100%.

Business Model & Market

Security as a subscription

CrowdStrike is a subscription software business. Customers pay recurring fees, generally priced per endpoint and per module, with the majority of revenue coming from high-margin subscription income. Professional services - incident response and proactive assessments - round out the mix. Because each new endpoint adds to the shared pool of telemetry, the product tends to get better as the customer base grows.

In the wider market, CrowdStrike sits among the leaders of the shift from single-point tools toward consolidated security platforms. Its main rivals approach the same goal from different starting points, and buyers increasingly choose based on how much they can consolidate onto one vendor.

CrowdStrike vs the field

Microsoft	Defender and Security Copilot, bundled with enterprise licensing and huge scale.
Palo Alto Networks	Cortex XSIAM, extending from a network-security heritage into the SOC.
SentinelOne	Singularity and Purple AI, a close endpoint-focused challenger.
Wiz & others	Cloud-security specialists competing on the cloud side of the platform.
CrowdStrike edge	A single agent, a compounding data asset and human-supervised AI across one platform.

EDR / XDRCloud SecurityIdentity Next-Gen SIEMThreat IntelAI Security

The Hard Chapter

July 19, 2024

No profile of CrowdStrike is complete without the day it made every front page. On July 19, 2024, a faulty content update to the Falcon sensor - a mismatch in a configuration file known as channel file 291 - introduced a logic error that crashed roughly 8.5 million Windows machines, sending them into the blue screen of death.

Airlines grounded flights, hospitals delayed procedures, banks and broadcasters went dark. It has been described as the largest IT outage in history. CrowdStrike issued a fix within about 90 minutes, but because affected machines were offline, many required manual recovery, and the disruption stretched for days.

The episode is a case study in blast radius: the more indispensable a security agent becomes, the more damage a single bad update can do. What followed is notable too - rather than collapsing, the company kept growing, reporting a 22% revenue increase in the fiscal year that spanned the incident and its aftermath.

The more indispensable you are, the larger your blast radius. Reliability is a feature. The lesson of channel file 291

Details That Stick

Bears, Pandas and Kittens

CrowdStrike gives the hacking groups it tracks animal code names by suspected origin - Bear for Russia-linked groups, Panda for China-linked, Kitten for Iran-linked. It reads like marketing, but it works: naming the adversary turns an abstract threat into something a boardroom can understand and fund.

Fancy Bear & Cozy Bear

The names CrowdStrike gave the groups it tied to the 2016 DNC breach - now part of the security lexicon.

The name itself

"CrowdStrike" reflects the original idea: crowdsource threat data across every protected endpoint.

A racing CEO

Co-founder George Kurtz competes in professional endurance sports-car racing outside the boardroom.

Deliberately light

The Falcon agent is built to run without slowing the machines it protects - a core design constraint.

Timeline

From startup to S&P 500

2011

CrowdStrike is founded

Kurtz, Alperovitch and Marston start the company with a cloud-first vision for security.

2012

First funding & services

Warburg Pincus backs the company; former FBI executive Shawn Henry joins to lead services.

2013

Falcon launches

The first Falcon product introduces the single-agent, cloud-native approach.

2016

DNC breach attribution

National attention arrives as CrowdStrike attributes the DNC hack to Russian intelligence groups.

2019

IPO on Nasdaq

CrowdStrike goes public under ticker CRWD in a marquee tech listing.

2023

AI & platform expansion

Charlotte AI and Falcon Foundry broaden the platform beyond core endpoint protection.

2024

Outage & S&P 500 entry

A faulty update triggers the largest IT outage in history, the same year CrowdStrike joins the S&P 500.

2026

Scale & stock split

Reports $4.81B in FY2026 revenue and completes a four-for-one stock split.

FAQ

Common questions

What does CrowdStrike do?

It provides cloud-native cybersecurity through its Falcon platform, using a single lightweight agent to protect endpoints, cloud workloads, identities and data, and to detect and stop breaches in real time.

Who founded CrowdStrike and when?

It was founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston. George Kurtz, formerly CTO of McAfee, is the CEO.

What was the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage?

A faulty Falcon sensor content update introduced a logic error that crashed roughly 8.5 million Windows systems worldwide, disrupting airlines, banks and hospitals - widely described as the largest IT outage in history.

How does CrowdStrike make money?

Primarily through subscriptions to Falcon platform modules, typically priced per endpoint and per module, plus professional services such as incident response.

Who are CrowdStrike's main competitors?

Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne and cloud-security specialists like Wiz, among others.

Share & Explore

Links & watch

Share this profile or dig into CrowdStrike's own channels, financials and product demos.

Websitecrowdstrike.com Investor Relationsir.crowdstrike.com LinkedIn/company/crowdstrike X / Twitter@CrowdStrike GitHub/CrowdStrike YouTube · DemosWatch product demos YouTube · InterviewsGeorge Kurtz interviews BlogCrowdStrike blog

Reporting compiled from CrowdStrike investor materials, SEC filings, Wikipedia and industry press. Figures are approximate where noted. - YesPress Newsroom