Intelligence-led security firm FireEye yesterday announced the acquisition of Respond Software, a company that uses automation to assist customers to comprehend and investigate security incidents.
The transaction closed on November 18, 2020, and is valued at approximately $186m in cash and stock.
FireEye said that the acquisition of Respond Software will open new market opportunities to deliver eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities to a wide range of customers. Furthermore, the deal will enable Mandiant Solutions to scale its expertise and front-line intelligence as part of the Mandiant Advantage platform.
“Respond’s product dramatically reduces time spent investigating false positives as it connects the dots among siloed, multi-vendor security controls in an easy-to-deploy cloud-based package," said Mike Armistead, Respond Software's chief executive officer prior to the acquisition.
"Now coupled with Mandiant’s world-class threat intelligence and incident response expertise feeding our models, customers can be confident the most up-to-date and relevant attack tactics and techniques are recognized and appropriately escalated."
California-based company Respond is creator of the Respond Analyst, an XDR engine that uses cloud-based data-science models to accelerate cyber-investigation and response. After ingesting data from a comprehensive set of security technologies, the engine automatically correlates multi-sourced attack evidence.
FireEye plans to make the XDR technology an integral part of the Mandiant Advantage platform, bringing vendor-agnostic XDR and investigation capable of integration with all customer environments. The company said the changes will quicken response times and provide better security outcomes for customers.
“With Mandiant’s position on the front lines, we know what to look for in an attack, and Respond’s cloud-based machine learning productizes our expertise to deliver faster outcomes and protect more customers,” said Kevin Mandia, FireEye chief executive officer.
“This creates a learning system with new capabilities that will enable us to expand our Mandiant portfolio and drive new XDR revenue through our Mandiant Advantage platform.”
Max Gazor from CRV, who led the Respond Software’s Series Seed round in 2016, commented: "Respond Software’s acquisition follows in the footsteps of other great CRV portfolio companies such as CloudGenix (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Affirmed Networks (acquired by Microsoft), and Signal Sciences (acquired by Fastly) making it the fourth major acquisition in CRV’s portfolio this year."