Introduction
George Kurtz is the co-founder and chief executive officer of CrowdStrike, a cloud-native cybersecurity company that uses AI and behavioral analytics to detect and respond to threats across endpoints, cloud workloads, and identities. Born in New Jersey in October 1970, Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike with Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston after leaving a senior role at McAfee, and has led the company since its founding through its 2019 initial public offering and subsequent growth into a benchmark endpoint protection vendor used across enterprise and government customers alike.
Professional background
Kurtz holds a bachelor’s degree from Seton Hall University and began his career in accounting before moving into cybersecurity. He built an early reputation as a security researcher and author, co-writing the well-known “Hacking Exposed” security book series that became a standard reference for security practitioners, before rising to Worldwide Chief Technology Officer and an executive vice president role at McAfee, then a roughly $2.5 billion security company. In November 2011, Kurtz joined private equity firm Warburg Pincus as an entrepreneur-in-residence, where he developed the concept that became CrowdStrike alongside Dmitri Alperovitch, a fellow security researcher.
Company-building context
Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike in February 2012 with Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston, backed by roughly $25 million in initial funding from Warburg Pincus, and launched its Falcon platform in 2013 with a cloud-native architecture designed to replace on-premise antivirus tools with lighter-weight, intelligence-driven endpoint agents. Under his leadership, CrowdStrike expanded from endpoint detection into a broader platform covering identity protection, cloud security, and a next-generation SIEM product, and the company went public on Nasdaq in June 2019 under the ticker CRWD, having by then already appeared on MIT Technology Review’s list of disruptive companies.
Public milestones
CrowdStrike experienced a widely reported global IT outage on July 19, 2024, caused by a faulty content update to its Falcon sensor, which disrupted systems across airlines, hospitals, and other sectors worldwide. Kurtz publicly apologized for the incident and the company published a detailed post-incident review alongside process changes to its testing and deployment practices. CrowdStrike has continued to report growth in areas including cloud security and its next-generation SIEM business in subsequent earnings disclosures, and Kurtz was named to Barron’s list of Top CEOs in 2026 in recognition of the company’s continued growth.
Why their work matters
CrowdStrike remains a widely referenced benchmark for AI-assisted endpoint defense at enterprise scale, and Kurtz’s public handling of the 2024 outage is itself a relevant case study in operational accountability for a security vendor whose product sits deep inside customer infrastructure. For readers mapping the modern security operations center, CrowdStrike under Kurtz illustrates both the promise and the operational risk of concentrating threat detection in a small number of AI-native platforms, a tension that has only grown more relevant as the company has expanded further into identity and SIEM data.
Sources and references
This profile is sourced from CrowdStrike’s official executive team page and investor relations site, with biographical corroboration from Wikipedia. Details of the July 2024 outage are limited to what CrowdStrike and Kurtz have publicly acknowledged, without speculative attribution of cause beyond the company’s own disclosures, and founding-year details are cross-checked against both CrowdStrike’s own materials and independent biographical sourcing.