Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Cyber Security myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
UK cyber security company Darktrace is accelerating its expansion in the US as part of a push by the group to hit $1bn in revenues and compete with larger rivals Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.
The Cambridge-based company, which was taken private in a £4.3bn deal last year by US private equity group Thoma Bravo, plans to invest more than $200mn in the US in 2026 — up 11 per cent from 2025 — in a bid to grow its US sales to half of its total revenues.
Darktrace’s move to deepen its presence in the US comes as the group seeks to boost growth by tapping into rising demand for cyber security as businesses are increasingly targeted by hackers.
“The US is the world’s largest and fastest-growing cyber security market . . . We see enormous opportunity for our business to grow its market share in this country and across the Americas,” said Jill Popelka, Darktrace chief executive.
The group, which provides artificial intelligence-based cyber security services, generated about 35 per cent of its $782mn revenue from its US operations in the year to June 2024 — its last year on the public markets.
Darktrace’s executives hope to increase that figure to 50 per cent, while seeking to surpass $1bn in revenue — something the company is likely to achieve by 2027 based on its current growth rate.
“If you look at the largest two publicly listed players in the cyber security space, Palo Alto and CrowdStrike, they’ll be running at numbers in terms of the US percentage of revenues of well over 50 [per cent] — that’s where ultimately we should be,” Phil Pearson, chief strategy officer at Darktrace, told the Financial Times.
This expansion push will include the opening of a new deployment centre and office in Dallas, as well as the appointment of two new US-based executives.
The Dallas deployment centre will have capacity to ship 40,000 appliances a year, which will support growing demand from the US federal government for its services.
Popelka took over the top job at Darktrace following the departure of former CEO Poppy Gustafsson last September.
Popelka, who was previously chief operating officer at the group, splits her time between the UK — where Darktrace has its headquarters — and the US.
Its expansion comes following a difficult few years for Darktrace, which was founded in 2013 by a group of mathematicians and cyber security experts. The group listed in London in 2021 and has had a turbulent history on the public markets.
It has also struggled to disentangle itself from ties with Mike Lynch and Autonomy, the UK software group he founded, before Lynch was acquitted of criminal charges in June in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud cases. He was among seven people who died after the superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily in August 2024.
In 2023, New York-based Quintessential Capital Management published a report alleging Darktrace appeared to have simulated or anticipated sales to “phantom” customers through a “network of willing resellers”.
Darktrace rebutted the claims and commissioned EY to review its key financial processes and controls. Later that year Darktrace said neither its management nor board considered “EY’s report to have any impact on Darktrace’s previously filed public company financial statements”.
