Published in 2026. This report examines developments from 2024–2026.
Executive summary
The AI cybersecurity landscape between 2024 and 2026 was shaped by three events that each, independently, would count as a major development in the category: Alphabet’s roughly $32 billion acquisition of cloud security company Wiz, which closed in March 2026 and became the largest acquisition of an Israeli technology company on record; the global IT outage of July 19, 2024, caused by a faulty CrowdStrike Falcon sensor update; and Mastercard’s completed acquisition of threat-intelligence company Recorded Future in December 2024. This report documents those events alongside the underlying companies and product categories — endpoint and identity protection, cloud security posture management, email and behavioral security, and Threat Intelligence — using only information traceable to an official company source, a regulatory or press disclosure, or established independent reporting. It excludes vendor-published detection-accuracy claims and market-size estimates that could not be independently corroborated.
Coverage period
This report covers developments from January 2024 through the first half of 2026 and is published in 2026, with a last-reviewed date of 2026-07-09. Company founding history is included only where necessary to explain a development within this window, such as the connection between Wiz’s founding team and their earlier company, Adallom. Readers relying on this report for time-sensitive vendor evaluation or incident-response planning should independently confirm current details against the official sources listed at the end of this report.
Methodology
This report applies the same three-tier sourcing approach used across this editorial series. Primary company materials were used for facts such as founding dates, executive titles, and product architecture descriptions. Regulatory filings, official press releases, and company blog disclosures were used for corporate events such as the Wiz acquisition, the CrowdStrike outage, and the Recorded Future acquisition. Independent reporting from established outlets, including Wikipedia’s well-sourced biographical and corporate entries, was used to corroborate dates and context. No vendor-published detection-rate, breach-prevention, or market-size statistic is asserted in this report unless independently corroborated; where such figures are commonly cited in industry commentary but could not be verified, this report notes their absence rather than repeating them.
Sector overview
AI cybersecurity in this period functioned as a set of increasingly overlapping categories rather than a single market. Endpoint and identity protection remained anchored by a small number of large, AI-native platforms that had already achieved public-market scale before 2024 and spent this period expanding into adjacent surfaces — cloud workloads, identity, and security information and event management (SIEM) data. Cloud security posture management, a newer category defined substantially by Wiz’s agentless scanning approach, saw its most prominent independent company acquired by one of the largest cloud infrastructure providers in the world. Email and behavioral security continued to reposition around the broader “AI-native” framing as legacy secure email gateway architecture aged. Threat intelligence, historically sold as an independent subscription product, began visibly flowing into buyer organizations’ own products through acquisition rather than remaining a standalone category. Across all four areas, the defining pattern of this period was consolidation — through acquisition, platform expansion, or rebranding — rather than the emergence of entirely new independent categories.
Category breakdown
Within endpoint and identity protection, CrowdStrike, co-founded by George Kurtz in 2011, and SentinelOne, co-founded by Tomer Weingarten and Almog Cohen in 2013, both expanded their platforms during this period — CrowdStrike into identity protection and a next-generation SIEM product, and SentinelOne into AI-specific security through its August 2025 agreement to acquire Prompt Security. Within cloud security posture management, Wiz, founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik, and Orca Security, founded by Avi Shua and Gil Geron, both applied agentless scanning approaches to detect misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across multi-cloud environments, with Wiz becoming part of Google Cloud following Alphabet’s completed acquisition in March 2026. Within email and behavioral security, Abnormal Security, founded by Evan Reiser and Sanjay Jeyakumar in 2018, rebranded to Abnormal AI in April 2025 as it broadened beyond email into wider identity and behavioral threat detection. Within threat intelligence, Recorded Future, founded by Christopher Ahlberg in 2009, became a Mastercard subsidiary following the acquisition that closed in December 2024, with its intelligence being integrated directly into Mastercard’s own cybersecurity, identity, and fraud-scoring products rather than continuing to operate as a fully independent subscription business.
Founder continuity through crisis and acquisition
A pattern worth highlighting across this category is how consistently founders remained in place through both operational crises and acquisitions. George Kurtz has led CrowdStrike continuously since co-founding it in 2011, including through the reputational pressure of the July 2024 outage, remaining the company’s public face during its recovery rather than being replaced by the board. Assaf Rappaport led Wiz from its January 2020 founding through its sale to Alphabet, and — notably — continued in the CEO role after the deal closed rather than departing at acquisition, echoing his earlier decision to stay on at Microsoft after Adallom’s 2015 sale rather than exiting immediately. Evan Reiser has remained CEO of Abnormal Security, now Abnormal AI, continuously since co-founding it in 2018 through its 2025 rebrand. This pattern of sustained founder involvement is a relevant signal for buyers in a category where customer trust is unusually sensitive to leadership credibility, since a vendor’s response to a crisis or ownership change is often shaped directly by whether its founding leadership remains accountable and visible.
Company examples
CrowdStrike, co-founded by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston in February 2012 with roughly $25 million in initial funding from Warburg Pincus, went public on Nasdaq in June 2019 under the ticker CRWD and remains led by Kurtz as CEO. SentinelOne, which went public in 2021 under the ticker S, continues to compete directly with CrowdStrike in AI-driven endpoint protection. Wiz became a Google Cloud subsidiary in March 2026 following Alphabet’s completed acquisition, with co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport continuing to lead the business and stating publicly that Wiz would continue supporting all major cloud providers rather than narrowing to Google Cloud exclusively. Abnormal Security, now operating under the Abnormal AI brand, continues to be led by co-founder and CEO Evan Reiser. Orca Security remains an independent, prominent agentless alternative in the cloud-native application protection platform category. Recorded Future now operates as a Mastercard subsidiary, its threat intelligence integrated into Mastercard’s broader security and fraud products.
Key developments
Three disclosed events anchor this report. First, Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz — announced in March 2025 at a reported value of approximately $32 billion and completed in March 2026 — is the largest acquisition of an Israeli technology company on record and one of the largest cybersecurity acquisitions in the industry’s history, folding one of the category’s most prominent independent cloud security platforms into one of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure providers. Second, the CrowdStrike outage of July 19, 2024, caused by a faulty content update to the Falcon sensor rather than a malicious attack, disrupted systems across airlines, hospitals, and other sectors worldwide; CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz publicly apologized, and the company published a detailed post-incident review alongside changes to its testing and staged-rollout processes. Third, Mastercard’s completed acquisition of Recorded Future on December 20, 2024, explicitly aimed at integrating AI-driven threat intelligence into Mastercard’s own security, identity, and fraud-scoring products, is a clear institutional signal that payments companies increasingly view standalone threat intelligence as a capability worth owning outright. A fourth, smaller but notable development is SentinelOne’s August 2025 agreement to acquire Prompt Security, aimed at extending detection capability to cover organizations’ own AI usage rather than only their traditional infrastructure.
Risks and limitations
This report’s reliance on publicly disclosed information means it cannot independently verify any vendor’s internal detection-accuracy or breach-prevention performance beyond what has been disclosed through audited financial results, regulatory filings, or independently corroborated reporting. The CrowdStrike outage discussion in this report is limited strictly to what CrowdStrike and its executives have publicly acknowledged, without speculative attribution of root cause beyond the company’s own disclosed post-incident review. The Wiz-Google integration was still in its early months at the time this report was prepared, and its longer-term product and organizational outcomes were not yet fully observable through public disclosures; readers should treat statements about Wiz’s continued multi-cloud support as the company’s stated intent rather than a guaranteed long-term outcome. Finally, this report excludes commonly cited but unverifiable industry Statistics about breach frequency, average dwell time, or detection accuracy, which may make it appear less quantitatively comprehensive than reports that repeat such figures; this is a deliberate editorial choice favoring verifiability over apparent completeness.
Platform scope expansion across the category
Nearly every company discussed in this report expanded its platform scope during the 2024–2026 window rather than remaining within its original category definition. CrowdStrike moved from pure endpoint protection into identity protection and next-generation SIEM data. Wiz and Orca Security both moved from posture management into broader workload and API security coverage. SentinelOne’s planned acquisition of Prompt Security signals a move toward securing organizations’ own AI usage as a new expansion vector, distinct from securing traditional infrastructure. Abnormal broadened from email specifically into wider identity and behavioral detection as part of its 2025 rebrand to Abnormal AI. Recorded Future’s intelligence, once sold as a standalone subscription product, is being folded directly into Mastercard’s fraud and identity products rather than continuing to be offered as a fully independent feed to the broader market. The consistent throughline across every company in this report is that remaining narrowly focused on an original product category became a less viable long-term strategy than continuously broadening the attack surface a platform claims to address, whether through organic product development or acquisition.
How this report differs from typical market commentary
This report deliberately does not open with a headline breach-cost figure or a projected market-size number, both of which are common in cybersecurity industry commentary but vary enormously depending on methodology and are frequently impossible to trace to a transparent, independently reproducible source. Instead, this report treats disclosed corporate events — the completed Wiz acquisition, the CrowdStrike outage and its published post-incident review, and the completed Recorded Future acquisition — as the more reliable evidence of how the category is actually consolidating, because each of these events required a public disclosure, a regulatory filing, or an acknowledgment from the companies themselves, rather than a vendor-commissioned survey or an unattributed industry estimate. Where this report cites a figure, such as an acquisition price or a headcount, that figure is attributed to a specific official source rather than presented as an independent estimate, and readers are encouraged to consult that source directly for the full context. This conservative sourcing standard means some claims that circulate widely in industry discussion, but that lack a verifiable origin, are intentionally left out of this report rather than repeated on the strength of general familiarity, even where doing so would make the narrative sound more dramatic or more definitive than the underlying evidence supports.
Conclusion
The AI cybersecurity landscape from 2024 to 2026 was defined less by incremental improvements in detection technology and more by three structural events — the Wiz-Google acquisition, the CrowdStrike outage, and the Recorded Future-Mastercard acquisition — that each reshaped a different part of the category’s ownership and operational risk profile. Readers evaluating vendors in this space should weigh ownership structure, founder continuity, and disclosed operational track record alongside detection capability, and should continue to monitor CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Wiz, Abnormal Security, Orca Security, and Recorded Future individually as the category continues to consolidate.
Sources
This report draws on official sources including CrowdStrike’s executive team page and investor relations site, SentinelOne’s and Orca Security’s official company pages, Wiz’s author biography for Assaf Rappaport, Google Cloud’s official press release confirming the completed Wiz acquisition, Abnormal AI’s official leadership page, and Mastercard’s newsroom announcement of its Recorded Future acquisition, supplemented by Wikipedia’s well-sourced biographical and corporate entries for corroborating dates. A complete list of source URLs, with the date each was last reviewed, is maintained in this report’s structured source list and is available to editorial staff for verification.
Disclaimer
This report is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute security, legal, or investment advice. It reflects publicly available information as of the last-reviewed date noted above and does not include material non-public information about any company discussed. Company details, ownership structures, and product capabilities can change after publication; readers making procurement, security, or investment decisions based on this content should verify current details directly with the companies involved. This report contains no sponsored content and no company discussed paid for or reviewed its inclusion prior to publication.