F5 Networks announced Friday afternoon that it had wrapped up its $1 billion deal to buy Shape Security. The deal, which was announced Dec. 19, adds end-to-end security offerings to F5's portfolio.
The acquisition merged F5's expertise in protecting applications across multi-cloud environments with Shape's fraud and abuse prevention capabilities.
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Santa Clara, Calif.-based Shape sells its fraud prevention platform to banks, airlines, retailers, and government agencies. Shape uses bot, fraud and abuse defenses to thwart credential stuffing attacks whereby cybercriminals use stolen passwords from third-party data breaches to take over online accounts.
Shape offers protection through its artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities, which are supported by cloud-based analytics to protect against attacks that slip through other fraud and security measures. Shape said its fraud prevention platform detects and blocks up to 1 billion fraudulent or unwanted transactions daily.
Shape’s application protection platform evaluates the data flow from the user into the application and uses sophisticated cloud-based analytics to decide if the traffic is good traffic or bad. Due to F5’s location in the data flow of traffic in over 80% of Fortune 500 application infrastructures, F5 is able to provide an insertion point for Shape’s security services.
The combination of F5 and Shape holds the promise of dramatically reducing the time and resources needed for organizations to deploy online fraud and abuse protection.
“We welcome Shape to the team and look forward to the work we will do together to transform the application security landscape for customers,” said François Locoh-Donou, F5 president and CEO, in a statement. “Shape’s advanced AI and analytics capabilities will help accelerate new ways of securing and enhancing the performance of every application, across any cloud.”
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Last year, Seattle-based F5 snagged virtual application delivery controller (ADC) vendor NGINX for $670 million. With Shape in hand, F5 is able to offer customers security protection across a wide range of its applications and NGINX's as customers undergo their digital transformations.
Shape Security was founded in 2011. In September, it crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold after raising $51 million in a Series F round of funding to bring its total outside investment to $183 million.
When the deal was announced last year, F5 said Derek Smith, co-founder and CEO of Shape, and his leadership team would join F5 "in key management roles," but didn't announce those roles on Friday. F5 Networks previously said that Shape would stay in its Santa Clara, California headquarters.