Fastly to Acquire Signal Sciences

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California edge cloud computing company Fastly has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire American cybersecurity company Signal Sciences.

Stock in Fastly rose by over 7% to $95.98 a share following the announcement of the impending $775m deal on Thursday morning. 

Under the terms of the agreement, Signal Sciences will be acquired for $200m in cash and Class A Common Stock worth roughly $575m. The transaction is due to be completed before the end of the year. 

Signal Sciences is a web application security company headquartered in Culver City, California. It was founded in 2014 by CEO Andrew Peterson, CTO Nick Galbreath, and CSO Zane Lackey following firsthand experience of the digital transformation and security challenges faced by Etsy. 

"We struggled with attempting to protect our key web applications and APIs as the legacy web application firewalls that were on the market caused more problems than they solved and slowed down our engineering and DevOps teams," said Peterson. 

"Out of necessity, we built our own solution to protect Etsy’s applications and recognized a new approach was badly needed not just by us, but by any company embracing DevOps and digital transformation."

Signal Sciences currently provides security to over 40,000 web applications, protecting trillions of web requests per month for household brands in every business vertical from finance to media to healthcare to manufacturing. 

The company has a Net Promoter Score of 83 and is described by Peterson as "one of the fastest-growing web application security companies in the world."

Fastly offers an edge cloud platform and is the creator of a software-defined network capable of handling an impressive 800+ billion requests per day. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco. 

“Now, as the digital transformation movement continues to accelerate, DevOps teams are struggling with inadequate and inflexible security tools,” said Joshua Bixby, chief executive officer of Fastly. 

“Together with Signal Sciences, we will give developers modern security tools designed for the way they work. This new solution will integrate with our Compute@Edge platform, accelerating the adoption of edge computing, while simultaneously solving for modern security challenges."

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