The American company CrowdStrike, a specialist in cybersecurity technology, has announced the acquisition of the Spanish startup Onum for $290 million (248.5 million euros), in a transaction aimed at strengthening its Falcon platform in a key area: real-time data management for security and IT operations.
As George Kurtz, Chief Executive Officer and founder of CrowdStrike, explains, “Onum serves both as a channel and a filter, transmitting high-quality filtered data directly to the platform to drive autonomous cybersecurity at scale. This is how we stop security breaches at the speed of AI, while providing our customers with complete control over their entire data ecosystem, far beyond cybersecurity alone.”
Traditional security systems face a significant daily challenge: integrating and analyzing data from various sources is usually a slow, complex, and costly process. For a security operations center to detect threats, it must first filter and process enormous volumes of information originating from servers, devices, and applications. This model not only delays the response but also creates a bottleneck that increases costs and limits the effectiveness of defensive actions.
According to the CrowdStrike press release, Onum will be instrumental in solving this problem with technology that functions as a real-time telemetry pipeline. Rather than storing data for later processing, Onum manages the data at the moment it is generated, eliminating friction and accelerating the entire process.
Its ability to act as an intelligent filter reduces the volume of irrelevant information and enables up to 50% savings in storage and management costs. Furthermore, it adds a layer of intelligence from the outset: CrowdStrike’s AI can begin identifying threats even before the data reaches Falcon, accelerating incident response by up to 70%.
Since its founding in 2023 by Pedro Castillo (CEO), Lucas Varela (CTO), and Pedro Tortosa (SVP Sales), Onum has pursued a well-defined vision: to provide companies with complete control over their data. In an environment where information generation is increasing exponentially and IT budgets face mounting pressure, Onum’s platform presents itself as a comprehensive solution capable of delivering real-time observability and analytics. This capability not only aims for cost savings but also for improvements in the efficiency of data analytics platforms.
This strategy has allowed Onum to grow rapidly and attract the attention of investors, raising more than $40 million to date. In April 2024, it was able to close a $28 million Series A financing round, led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Kibo Ventures and Insight Partners.
At that time, Castillo himself already hinted at the role that security could play in the company’s future: “Data reduction is only the first use case on which Onum has focused. Because the Onum platform is designed to process data according to an organization’s needs—not merely to reduce it—Onum can drive any number of use cases, limited only by your imagination. In fact, many of our clients already use Onum for a wide range of applications, including security response, risk reduction, compliance, customer usage, and network efficiency.”
As of October 2024, Onum has its own team based in Boston, United States.
In recent years, CrowdStrike has become widely known for its involvement in investigations of high-profile cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 and the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
More recently, in July 2024, it was at the center of global media attention due to a defective update to its software. This error caused widespread disruptions in systems running Microsoft Azure, affecting thousands of companies, airports, and banks around the world and resulting in the infamous “blue screen of death” (BSOD). Although this was a technical failure and not a cyberattack, the incident highlighted the global dependence on cybersecurity tools and the critical importance of their proper functioning.
Image: From left to right, Lucas Varela (CTO), Pedro Tortosa (SVP Sales), and Pedro Castillo (CEO).
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