CrowdStrike is ‘cybersecurity's infrastructure layer’ for AI era: CEO George Kurtz

The cybersecurity giant is seeing surging demand for AI security along with massive deal growth from its Falcon Flex subscription model, Kurtz said Wednesday

CrowdStrike has all the right elements to position its comprehensive Falcon platform as the go-to way to secure the usage of AI and agentic tools going forward, CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz said Wednesday.

Speaking with Wall Street analysts during CrowdStrike’s quarterly call, Kurtz said it’s becoming increasingly clear that the cybersecurity giant is ahead of rivals when it comes to providing advanced security in the AI era, particularly in the wake of Anthropic’s disclosure of details about its Claude Mythos cyber model earlier this year.

Kurtz made the comments as CrowdStrike released financial results for the second quarter of its FY27, ended 31 July, which surpassed Wall Street expectations.

“In this threat landscape, CrowdStrike stands out,” he said.

“Ever since Mythos, we've seen growth in our business not measured by meetings or calls, but measured by ARR.”

As one example, Kurtz said that CrowdStrike continues to see huge traction for its AI detection and response (AIDR) offering, Falcon AIDR.

Annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth for Falcon AIDR “nearly tripled” by 31 July compared to the prior quarter sequentially, “as customers embrace our frictionless approach to AI visibility and security,” he said.

In concert with other fast-growing offerings including Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security and Falcon Exposure Management as well as a continued re-acceleration in demand for core Falcon endpoint security, CrowdStrike is now exceedingly well-positioned for meeting customer and partner needs amid the AI rush, Kurtz said.

“Taken together, the Falcon platform is cybersecurity's infrastructure layer for AI adoption,” he said during the call Wednesday.

CrowdStrike is also seeing massive deal growth from its Falcon Flex subscription model, Kurtz said.

Falcon Flex aims to enable partners to rapidly package up and deploy the dozens of tools CrowdStrike now offers on its platform, while providing improved agility and cost savings for customers.

Ending ARR from customers that have adopted Falcon Flex surpassed $2.29bn during the company’s fiscal second quarter, representing growth of 101 per cent year-on-year, according to Kurtz.

Flex is “the commercial harness to enable customer success in the agentic era,” he said, adding that the company has now “kicked Falcon Flex activity into high gear with our Flex-first go-to-market strategy.”

During the quarter, each of the company’s ten largest deals involved Flex while CrowdStrike added more than 935 new Flex customers, Kurtz said.

CrowdStrike’s partner base is also continuing to play a central role in the company’s momentum, including around the AI security push, Kurtz said.

He pointed to the company’s frontier AI security initiative, Project QuiltWorks, which is focused on working with partners to enable protection against AI-discovered vulnerabilities.

CrowdStrike has increasingly been expanding the initiative to more partners since it launched in April, most recently with the announcement earlier this month that Project QuiltWorks is now open to a broad set of MSPs and other partners.

“To date, our QuiltWorks partners are collaborating with us on nearly $400m of total contract value pipeline,” Kurtz said.

In other partner-related milestones, CrowdStrike’s global systems integrator business grew nearly 50 per cent as of its latest quarter, year-on-year, driven largely by Next-Gen SIEM and vulnerability management, while the company is seeing “significant traction in the SMB space” through MSSP partnerships, Kurtz said.

For CrowdStrike’s fiscal second quarter, total revenue grew 26 per cent year-on-year to reach $1.5bn (£1.1bn), beating the Wall Street analyst consensus estimate by $30m.

The company also raised its full fiscal year guidance Wednesday.

The company also reported non-GAAP net income of 31 cents per diluted share, surpassing analyst expectations by 2 cents per diluted share.

This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.