0

Application services company F5 Networks has acquired Santa Clara-based fraud prevention company Shape Security for approximately $1 billion. With this acquisition, Shape’s machine learning and AI-powered capabilities are likely to extend F5’s portfolio of application services and also accelerate its product and total revenue growth.

Founded in 2011, Shape Security has raised $183 million to date. The company is said to have built an advanced platform, utilizing AI and ML, supported by cloud-based analytics to protect against attacks that bypass other security and fraud controls.

According to the company, this acquisition brings together F5’s expertise in protecting applications across multi-cloud environments with Shape’s anti-fraud capabilities to transform application security. Together F5 and Shape offer organizations end-to-end application security, potentially saving billions of dollars lost to fraud, the company added.

This is F5’s second acquisition this year. Earlier, the company acquired NGINX (the company that provides open-source software of the same name) for $670 million.

Once the deal closes, Derek Smith, and the leadership team will join F5 in key management roles. Shape will continue to be located in their current Santa Clara headquarters, the company added.

The deal should be completed in the first calendar quarter of 2020.

You may also like