Company type | Public |
---|---|
Founded | 2013[1] |
Headquarters | Cambridge, England |
Key people | Gordon Hurst (Chairman) Poppy Gustafsson (CEO) |
Services | Cybersecurity |
Revenue | US$545.4 million (2023) [2] |
US$36.5 million (2023) [2] | |
US$59.0 million (2023) [2] | |
Total assets | US$751.9 million (2023) [2] |
Total equity | US$263.5 million (2023) [2] |
Number of employees | 2,269 (2023) [2] |
Website | darktrace |
Darktrace plc is a British [3] cyber security company, established in 2013 and headquartered in Cambridge, England. [3] It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Darktrace was founded in 2013 in Cambridge, where the Darktrace AI Research Centre is based, with the company's second R&D centre located in The Hague, Netherlands. [4] It was founded by mathematicians and cyber defense experts at Invoke Capital, a company owned by Mike Lynch. [5] [6] Lynch was co-founder of Autonomy, sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 in a transaction leading to accusations of fraud and to a legal fight over extraditing him to the United States. [7] In its stock market listing registration documents Darktrace rated the potential liability relating to the fallout of the action against Lynch as "low risk". [8]
Many of Darktrace's management personnel, including chief executive Poppy Gustafsson, chief technology officer Jack Stockdale, and chief strategy and artificial intelligence officer Nicole Eagan, were recruited from Autonomy. [5]
In April 2021, Darktrace listed on the London Stock Exchange with a market value of circa £2.5 billion. [9] [10] The market value reached a peak of £7 billion within months, with a share value peak of £10, but later fluctuated. On 6 March 2022, Darktrace opened with a share value of £6.46, with a market cap of £3.43 billion. [11]
There has been criticism about the company's technology and its founding investor by short-seller Matthew Earl, head of the Shadowfall fund, and analysts Peel Hunt. In January 2022, Earl questioned Darktrace's model and culture, warning clients that the company's model was "watery-thin", based more on sales style than business substance. [8]
In March 2022, Darktrace acquired Cybersprint, a Dutch attack surface management company, for €47.5 million. [12]
On 31 January 2023, Quintessential Capital Management , a New York-based hedge fund and short seller, published a detailed report alleged potential accounting errors at Darktrace, making claims about potential irregularities in contracts with resellers and customers, predominantly dating from before Darktrace’s public listing in 2021. [13] Darktrace has disputed this. [14] Quintessential pointed towards connections between Darktrace and HP Autonomy, the UK software company with which Darktrace shares many ties. Autonomy was accused of irregular accounting practices relating to its $11.7bn sale to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. [15]
The company’s share price fell 12 per cent when Quintessential first disclosed its short position on 30 January 2023. The shares then fell a further 8 per cent the following day, after the report was published, down to 200p. [16]
On 18 July 2023, EY concluded its review into the company’s contracts and internal financial processes. EY found a “small number of errors and inconsistencies” with some of the contracts but nothing that would be “material” to Darktrace's financial statements. [17]
In April 2024, the private equity business, Thoma Bravo, offered to acquire the company for $5.3 billion. [18]
Darktrace's product uses unsupervised (in particular) machine learning techniques to build an intrinsic "pattern of life" for every network, device, and user within an organisation. From this evolving understanding of 'normal', it can then detect potential threats as they emerge in real time. [19] It employs an autonomous response technology, Antigena, to take action against in-progress cyber-attacks. [20] The product also visualises network activity on a user interface, called the 'Threat Visualiser'. [21] Since the company's inception in 2013, its technology has been deployed some 9,000 times. [22] Currently, Darktrace can cover Industrial Operational Technology, Email, SaaS, Cloud, Network, and Endpoint. [23]
Darktrace has claimed that it has the capability to defend against zero-day attacks, for example some log4j attacks. [24]
Darktrace was included in Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2018, [25] The Cyber Award's AI Product of the Year in 2020, [26] Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential Companies in 2021 [27] and Fast Company's top 10 most innovative AI companies for 2022. [28] In 2022, Darktrace won the AI & Machine Learning Award [29] at the 2022 Go:Tech Awards. [30]
Darktrace signed a partnership deal with McLaren Racing in 2020. [31] In 2021, the deal was extended to include McLaren's IndyCar team. [32]
Nvidia Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Cisco specializes in specific tech markets, such as the Internet of things (IoT), domain security, videoconferencing, and energy management with leading products including Webex, OpenDNS, Jabber, Duo Security, Silicon One, and Jasper.
In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the market value of the asset falls. This is the opposite of the more common long position, where the investor will profit if the market value of the asset rises. An investor that sells an asset short is, as to that asset, a short seller.
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, commonly referred to as Deloitte, is a British multinational professional services network. Deloitte is the largest professional services network by revenue and number of employees in the world and is considered one of the Big Four accounting firms, along with EY, KPMG, and PwC.
Thomas M. Siebel is an American billionaire businessman, technologist, and author. He was the founder of enterprise software company Siebel Systems and is the founder, chairman, and CEO of C3.ai, an artificial intelligence software platform and applications company.
Masayoshi Son is a Japanese billionaire technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. A third-generation Zainichi Korean, he naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1990. He is the founder, representative director, corporate officer, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG), a strategic technology-focused investment holding company, as well as chairman of UK-based Arm Holdings.
Michael Richard Lynch is a British technology entrepreneur, known as the co-founder of Autonomy Corporation and the founder of Invoke Capital. Lynch additionally became a co-founder, alongside Invoke Capital, of cybersecurity company Darktrace. He has also had various other roles, including those in an advisory capacity.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also Chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
Workday, Inc., is an American on‑demand (cloud-based) financial management, human capital management, and student information system software vendor. Workday was founded by David Duffield, founder and former CEO of ERP company PeopleSoft, along with former PeopleSoft chief strategist Aneel Bhusri, following Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005.
Thoma Bravo, LP, is an American private equity and growth capital firm based in Chicago. It is known for being particularly active in acquiring enterprise software companies and has over $130 billion in assets under management as of 2023.
Splunk Inc. is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a web-style interface. Its software helps capture, index and correlate real-time data in a searchable repository, from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.
Shopify Inc., stylized as shopify is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online retailers a suite of services, including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools.
Fintech, a clipped compound of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. The use of smartphones for mobile banking, investing, borrowing services, and cryptocurrency are examples of technologies designed to make financial services more accessible to the general public. Fintech companies consist of both startups and established financial institutions and technology companies trying to replace or enhance the usage of financial services provided by existing financial companies.
Burford Capital, founded in 2009, provides specialized finance to the legal market. It operates as a finance and professional services company worldwide with principal offices in New York, London and Chicago. The company offers financing to lawyers and clients engaged in litigation and arbitration, asset recovery and other legal finance and advisory activities.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023.
The Wirecard scandal was a series of corrupt business practices and fraudulent financial reporting that led to the insolvency of Wirecard, a payment processor and financial services provider, headquartered in Munich, Germany. The company was part of the DAX index. They offered customers electronic payment transaction and risk management services, as well as the issuance and processing of physical cards. The subsidiary, Wirecard Bank AG, held a banking license and had contracts with multiple international financial services companies.
Hindenburg Research LLC is a U.S. investment research firm with a focus on activist short-selling founded by Nathan Anderson in 2017. Named after the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, which they characterize as a human-made avoidable disaster, the firm generates public reports via its website that allege corporate fraud and malfeasance. Companies that have been the subjects of their reports include Adani Group, Nikola, Clover Health, Block, Inc., Kandi, and Lordstown Motors. These reports also feature defenses of the practice of short-selling and explanations of how short-sells can "play a critical role in exposing fraud and protecting investors."
Nick Molnar is an Australian entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Afterpay.
Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) is a zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, involving arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was privately disclosed to the Apache Software Foundation, of which Log4j is a project, by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's security team on 24 November 2021. Before an official CVE identifier was made available on 10 December 2021, the vulnerability circulated with the name "Log4Shell", given by Free Wortley of the LunaSec team, which was initially used to track the issue online. Apache gave Log4Shell a CVSS severity rating of 10, the highest available score. The exploit was simple to execute and is estimated to have had the potential to affect hundreds of millions of devices.
MEEZA QSTP is an IT provider founded in Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP).