F5 Acquires Agentic AI Security Startup Fletch - Dark Reading

APPLICATION SECURITY CYBERSECURITY OPERATIONS NEWS News, news analysis, and commentary on the latest trends in cybersecurity technology. F5 Acquires Agentic AI Security Startup Fletch Agentic AI technology will be integrated into the recently launched F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform. Jeffrey Schwartz,Contributing Writer June 6, 2025 3 Min Read SOURCE: MICHAEL VI VIA ALAMY STOCK PHOTO F5 this week announced the acquisition of Fletch, a San Francisco-based startup with agent-based artificial intelligence (AI) technology that analyzes massive amounts of threat intelligence data and remediates the most severe vulnerabilities in real time. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but most of Fletch's 15 employees have joined F5, which was seeking the technology and expertise to bring agentic AI capabilities to the recently introduced F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). Launched earlier this year, the ADSP unifies F5's load balancing and network traffic technology with its application programming interface (API) security offerings, creating what it describes as an integrated application delivery controller (ADC) and security platform. Chris Ford, vice president of F5's AI Center of Excellence, says F5 will integrate Fletch's agentic AI services into the new F5 AI Data Fabric. Released earlier this year, the AI Data Fabric is a part of the ADSP that aims to simplify the implementation of generative AI capabilities across the F5 portfolio. Related:Flaw-Finding AI Assistants Face Criticism for Speed, Accuracy "The Fletch technology will help accelerate our security analytics story with agentic AI," Ford says. In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Fletch founder and CEO Grant Wernick explained why the ADSP needs agentic AI. "Agentic AI can analyze this noise, correlate it with external and internal data sources, and prioritize the most critical threats, often before an indicator of compromise is found," Wenick noted. "It can also provide real-time context and assign tasks to other agents." F5 describes its new AI Data Fabric as an AI factory that combines data-processing pipelines, foundational transformer models, its ecosystem of shared modules, machine-learning operations, and access to the control plane via a software development kit. The AI Data Fabric is designed to generate and label training data, train and tune task-specific models, and package and deploy those models. Further, it monitors the models' performance and tracks any degradation of machine-learning model performance, aka "drift." However, F5 needed to enhance the AI Data Fabric with natural language processing (NLP), agentic AI, and security analytics capabilities, according to Ford. "We were looking for a property that would help us in this area, and we found them in Fletch," he says. "We're seeking to embed artificial intelligence and machine learning into the products that we deliver to customers." Security Alert Help In the coming months, F5 plans to integrate Fletch's natural language interfaces with the new AI assistants released with the AI Data Fabric. Fletch's technology will also prioritize alerts. Related:Automaker Secures the Supply Chain With Developer-Friendly Platform "The first use case, of course, is simplifying the alert noise with proactive tasks," Ford says. "But the capabilities can also generate narratives about security posture. For example, they can do dynamic visualizations on data, so we can help our customers explore their data just by asking for it in a natural language interface and generally generating more proactive insights." Fletch also offers feeds to threat intelligence sources. They scour open source intelligence sources, such as websites, Ford says. "It monitors around 10,000 sources on a daily basis, with around 100,000 different articles scanned," he notes. Ford says it uses AI to discover new sources, expire old ones, and perform semantic analysis on all the collected content to identify data, such as hard and soft indicators of compromise. "They can map to the MITRE attack framework and do things like deduplication," Ford says. "They're using AI on all this data that they collect to correlate it with alerts to lead them in the direction of the most impactful alerts." About the Author Jeffrey Schwartz Contributing Writer Jeffrey Schwartz is a journalist who has covered information security and all forms of business and enterprise IT, including client computing, data center and cloud infrastructure, and application development for more than 30 years. Jeff is a regular contributor to Channel Futures. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Redmond magazine and contributed to its sister titles Redmond Channel Partner, Application Development Trends, and Virtualization Review. Earlier, he held editorial roles with CommunicationsWeek, InternetWeek, and VARBusiness. Jeff is based in the New York City suburb of Long Island. 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