Security at Scale: Fastly Announces Intent to Acquire Signal Science

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have announced our intent to acquire Signal Sciences.

Since our founding, Fastly has focused on empowering developers to innovate, to build the next wave of digital experiences without sacrificing scale, security, and speed. We know that as a developer’s work evolves, the tools used must evolve as well. We have built a powerful, serverless edge cloud platform, designed from the ground up to be programmable, transparent, and performant. 

Security has always been a part of Fastly’s DNA, not just within products, but in our vision of trust and safety as a modern platform. We understand the responsibility we have to help not just our customers, but our customers’ customers. We have long envisioned a single security solution that protected web applications and web APIs at the edge, closer to users and out of the datacenter. A solution that detects threats and responds to them, regardless of threat type and most importantly, making it simple for developers and security folks to deploy, configure and manage within their development workflows. We set out to prove that truly effective security can exist as long as it is embraced and adopted by both security professionals and developers. 

To accelerate and expand this view of the future, we sought to acquire an organization with a complementary vision. Signal Sciences’ technology combined with Fastly’s current solutions will form Fastly’s upcoming new security offering, called Secure@Edge. Secure@Edge will be a modern, unified web application and API security solution that will integrate with our Compute platform, and power and protect companies looking to further or begin their digital transformation. Moreover, Secure@Edge will give developers more power over the security of their code, at the edge of the network, will result in not only more secure applications, but also faster, and more performant applications and shorter innovation cycles.

We found excellent technology and like-minded people at Signal Sciences. Signal Sciences has built a developer-first, powerful unified security solution that provides full protection from the latest web, API, and mobile security threats. From a web application and API security perspective, the Signal Sciences product provides amazing customer value in bot management, Account Takeover Protection, API protection, Runtime Self-Application protection (RASP), rate limiting, and Web Application Firewall (WAF). It is user-friendly, fully programmable, and delivers the best visibility we have seen in any security product. They see the world the same way we do, focused on the security dimension of developer empowerment and DevOps. Signal Sciences protects over 40,000 applications (including Duo Security, DataDog, Under Armour, Twilio SendGrid, and Doordash, as indicated on the company’s website), has $28 million* in annual recurring revenue, and over 85% gross margin growth; we’re looking forward to continuing our product momentum and company growth. This powerful, integrated new way of development unlocks the innovation and creativity that will power those embarking on their digital transformation journey and those natively born into the new digital age. 

We have great confidence in our ability to integrate Signal Sciences' technology because of the fundamentally flexible architecture of Compute. We also believe that solving the security challenges at the edge will significantly accelerate adoption of edge computing, creating a flywheel effect for uptake of our Compute solution.

We are humbled that Signal Sciences has agreed to join our team. We’re excited to work together with Signal Sciences to provide our customers with the best and most secure developer experience possible, because we know that the edge should be an enabler to innovation.

*As of June 30, 2020.

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Joshua has been helping Fastly grow for seven years, including as CEO since February 2020. With Joshua as part of the leadership team, Fastly went public in 2019 and continues to expand its modern approach to online development globally.


Joshua’s experience growing companies online dates back to the early 2000s, when he grew three startups to a successful exit. Later, as a founder and adviser at Stanley Park Ventures, Joshua cultivated the passion for digital transformation that he brings to his role at Fastly — by using technology to address the modern challenges facing traditionally offline companies in areas like finance, alcohol rehabilitation, and diabetes prevention.


When he’s not helping make the web a better place, Joshua enjoys spending time with his wife, coaching his three sons in sports, and being an active part of his community.

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