Accenture Buys Majority Stake in Dragos in $4.2B Deal

Critical Infrastructure Security , Endpoint Security , Governance & Risk Management Accenture Buys Majority Stake in Dragos in $4.2B Deal Deal Combines Dragos OT Threat Detection With runZero, NetRise Jennifer Lawinski • June 18, 2026     Credit Eligible Get Permission Accenture is acquiring a majority stake in Dragos and full ownership of runZero and NetRise in a $4.2 billion deal to build an end-to-end OT cybersecurity platform. (Image: Shutterstock) Accenture has agreed to acquire a majority stake in operational technology threat detection firm Dragos, along with full ownership of runZero and NetRise, the companies announced on Thursday. The combined value of the transactions nears $4.2 billion. See Also: Airlines and Airports: Visibility Across OT, IoT, and IT Under the agreement, Dragos will continue to operate as an independent company under co-founder and CEO Robert M. Lee, and after regulatory signoff, runZero's exposure assessment capabilities and NetRise's software supply chain and firmware security features will be integrated into the Dragos platform, Lee wrote in a blog post. runZero CEO HD Moore, NetRise CEO Thomas Pace, and NetRise Chief Technology Officer and Chief Scientist Michael Scott will become Dragos executives once the transaction closes, which is expected in August or September 2026, pending regulatory approval. "The next phase of Dragos is about meeting this market moment and closing the gap the mission requires. Dragos is going to make OT security more effective for the specialists who have always relied on it, more accessible to the IT professionals now in the fight, and delivery at the scale and speed required to meet this moment," Lee wrote. The addition of runZero brings exposure assessment and attack-surface intelligence across IT, OT, internet of things and cloud environments. NetRise contributes firmware-level device visibility and a software supply-chain security dataset. Lee said the combined platform will give industrial operators a single place to see what's on their OT network, understand what's running on it and respond to active threats. The deal comes on the heels of Dragos's acquisition of Phosphorus, a connected device discovery and remediation company, earlier this month. Lee told ISMG the expanded platform will also strengthen Dragos's incident response capabilities, giving its IR team a broader set of tools to bring into active engagements and to deploy in customer environments ahead of an incident. Accenture's incident response team gains the same access. The two companies will operate their IR businesses independently, Lee said, but could refer clients to each other for surge capacity when needed. The decision, he said, rests with the client. Lee said the deal's structure was central to the decision to move forward with Accenture. He wrote that Dragos's OT-focused mission has been written into the company's legally binding governing documents, giving it a permanence that, in his characterization, previous investor relationships did not guarantee. Lee said he will remain CEO, will sit on the company's new board of directors and retain what he described as more operational autonomy than he held under Dragos's prior ownership structure. The combined OT cybersecurity organizations are expected to generate approximately $208 million in annual recurring revenue as of June 2026, up 53% year over year. Accenture said the acquisitions carry strong gross margins and, while initially dilutive to earnings, are expected to become accretive to earnings per share and free cash flow over time. "In an age when AI-driven cyberthreats and geopolitical risk are evolving at a rapid pace, our cybersecurity practice is growing by double-digits and has a strong track record of leveraging inorganic opportunity to fuel organic growth," said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture, in a statement. "We are confident Dragos' differentiated OT platform will accelerate our growth in the critical infrastructure and industrial operations markets." The company said it already leads in OT cybersecurity services, a market it estimates at $7 billion, and is now moving into OT cybersecurity software, which it projects at $27 billion in 2026 and growing to nearly $59 billion by 2031. The move extends more than a decade of OT-focused acquisitions by Accenture, which has grown its cybersecurity business to $10 billion in fiscal year 2025 from $700 million in 2016, a compound annual growth rate the company says is four times its overall rate, according to a MarketsandMarkets study commissioned by Accenture. Previous OT acquisitions include Cimation in 2015, Revolutionary Security in 2020 and, more recently, True North Solutions and SYSTEMA. Accenture said Dragos will retain its vendor-neutral approach and will continue supporting customers' multi-vendor OT environments. The company said Dragos will work with partners across the technology ecosystem, including competitors to Accenture, and will remain independent in its product decisions. Wall Street questioned the deal on Thursday. Accenture shares fell by more than 18% Thursday afternoon after it missed Q3 guidance, lowered its outlook for the fiscal year and announced the $4.2 billion cybersecurity acquisition.