SentinelOne acquires Peak XV-backed PingSafe for over $100 million

SentinelOne’s deal to acquire PingSafe valued the Peak XV-backed young startup at over $100 million, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, in one of the strongest and fastest deals emerging from India.

The New York Stock Exchange-listed AI security firm disclosed the cash and stock deal last week, but didn’t reveal the financial terms. SentinelOne, PingSafe and PeakXV didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The terms of the deal haven’t been previously reported.

Founded in 2021, PingSafe is a relatively new and small security company with fewer than 100 employees and over 50 customers, mostly in India. The firm remained largely in stealth mode until last year, and was backed by Peak XV’s Surge in the early-stage fund’s sixth cohort. PingSafe had raised a total of about $3.3 million in funding.

“We think integration of PingSafe’s CNAPP [cloud native application protection platform] will bolster S’s cloud security offering, providing a wide range of agentless CNAPP capabilities – S has expressed its intent to be price competitive in the cloud security market and we wonder if the acquisition will play a role in pricing,” Barclays wrote in a note to clients.

PingSafe is “among the fastest ‘seed to significant exits’ Indian ecosystem has ever seen,” Rajan Anandan, who leads Surge at Peak XV, tweeted last week.

“SentinelOne is a pioneer and leader in AI-powered security, and we share a common mission to secure the cloud and make the Internet a safer place,” said Anand Prakash, founder and chief executive of PingSafe and one of the world’s top five white hat hackers, in a prepared statement last week. “The combination of our cutting-edge CNAPP capabilities with SentinelOne’s market-leading AI security platform will supercharge cloud security by providing world-class protection for multi-cloud infrastructure, from development to deployment.”

The purchase of PingSafe represents a further endorsement of the increasing trend of Indian software businesses targeting global expansion. By first developing SaaS solutions in the home market, a new generation of Indian entrepreneurs have subsequently set their sights on worldwide growth.

New Delhi is inching closer to launch the second phase of its marquee Startup India program with a focus on deep tech startups, Indian daily Economic Times reported Monday. The planned doubling-down on advanced technology businesses marks the latest gambit aimed at transforming the subcontinent into a global innovation powerhouse to rival the likes of Silicon Valley.