Elastic to Acquire Endpoint Security Firm Endgame for $243 Million

Elastic (NYSE: ESTC), the publicly traded company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced today that it has agreed to acquire endpoint security firm Endgame in a $234 million deal.

Built on open source technology, Elastic allows customers to pull, search and analyze vast amounts of data from various sources and formats and visualize it in real time. 

With rich endpoint information coming from Endgame’s software, the Elastic platform will have many more data points to analyze and crunch through, allowing customers to find hidden threats.

Endgame’s technology already uses Elasticsearch as its main data store for its alerts and investigation workflows, and combined with Elastic’s existing SIEM efforts, Endgame’s endpoint prevention, detection, and response (EPP + EDR) capabilities will help customers extend threat hunting to the endpoint, the company says.

“We have been working on expanding to collect additional security-oriented data, including data from hosts, in the Elastic Common Schema (ECS),” Elastic CEO Shay Banon wrote in a blog post. “Endgame’s endpoint product would take that to a whole new level. It has built-in, enriched security data collection capabilities. This data is a gem to store in a powerful search engine like Elasticsearch. With Kibana’s real-time visualization, security users would gain access to a whole new level of analysis to help protect their organizations from attacks.”

The purchase $234 million price will be paid through the issuance of Elastic stock, the assumption of outstanding equity awards and the repayment of outstanding indebtedness, which currently amounts to $14 million, Elastic said, noting that it will “take some months until” the transaction closes due to conditions to the merger.

Endgame was founded in 2008 by Chris Rouland and other executives who previously worked with the CIA and Internet Security Systems. It originally discovered and sold 0-day vulnerabilities, but shifted away from this around 2014. The company has raised nearly $112 million in funding, and has been led by CEO Nate Fick, the former CEO of the Center for a new American Security, an independent research institution, and a former U.S. Marine who served as an infantry officer in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In December 2016, Endgame announced that it had been awarded an $18.8 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to have elite Air Force Cyber Protection Teams leverage the Endgame platform to protect endpoints and critical infrastructure. In January 2018 it was awarded a $1 million contract by the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. Tenth Fleet (Navy) to protect more than 500,000 computers.

Devon Kerr, a principal researcher at Endgame, is a SecurityWeek columnist.

Related: Endgame Unveils Siri-like Feature for Security Operations Teams