F5’s purchase this week of SurePath AI, a startup that gets artificial intelligence into corporate networks, is part of a broader effort by the Seattle company to cement itself in the booming market for enterprise AI.
“When a business embraces AI, it becomes less visible in what AI is working on in the organization,” said François Locoh-Donou, chairman, president and CEO of F5, in an interview on this weekend’s GeekWire Podcast, conducted Thursday at the company’s headquarters in downtown Seattle.
Denver-based SurePath, founded in 2023 and led by founder Casey Bleeker as CEO, had about 19 employees and raised about $6 million in venture funding, according to PitchBook. Financial terms of the F5 acquisition were not disclosed.
SurePath monitors the company’s network to see what AI tools and agents employees are using, including those the company doesn’t know about, and tracks what they’re doing.
F5 integrates SurePath into its comprehensive AI security suite, announced this week, designed to detect AI models and agents operating within a company, assess them for vulnerabilities, and implement guard lines to keep them secure.
Locoh-Donou said customers were forced to bundle it together in different products. “Having four, five, six different tools to discover, test and protect your AI is a nightmare,” he said.
Kunal Anand, chief product officer of F5, compared the problem to an earlier era, when employees adopted cloud software faster than their IT departments could keep up with it. The main difference is that the AI version moves faster and carries higher stakes.
“Shadow AI is a shadow SaaS with a fast clock and a large blast radius,” he wrote in a blog post.
F5, founded in Seattle in 1996, develops technology to secure and deploy applications on multiple platforms. The publicly traded company reported $3.1 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year and marked its 30th anniversary in May.
The SurePath deal is the latest in a series of acquisitions by the company, including its latest acquisition of CalypsoAI, now offered as F5 AI Red Team and F5 AI Guardrails.
Locoh-Donou said that the company weighs three things in each purchase: whether it can develop the technology itself quickly enough, whether the deal serves customers in good faith, and, above all, whether the team will be compatible with the F5 culture.
“We have met companies in this field that had high-quality technology and smart people, but it was clear to us that they would never suit us,” he said. “So we left.”
Locoh-Donou discussed discovery, the evolution of F5, the rise of AI, the World Cup in Seattle and other topics in a GeekWire Podcast interview. Check out the episode this weekend, and subscribe to GeekWire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
