F5, a Seattle-based application delivery and security company, has acquired Fletch, a San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence to help companies identify threats and reduce alert fatigue. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. F5 plans to integrate Fletch’s AI capabilities into its own platform.
Kunal Anand, F5’s Chief Innovation Officer, said, “This is a big leap forward for intelligent, AI-native security.”
Fletch, which raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by True Ventures two years ago, has 15 employees. Thirteen of those employees will join F5. Fletch CEO Ari Wernick co-founded the company with Chris Wysopal, who departed in 2023.
Wernick and Wysopal previously started Insight Engines and Weotta together. In a blog post, Wernick said, “By leveraging AI and years of natural language processing know-how, we help organizations translate complex data into clear, human-readable tasks, enabling faster and smarter decision-making.
This acquisition marks another significant step for F5 in enhancing its security offerings with advanced AI technologies. As enterprises across Asia Pacific adopt AI at scale, they face new infrastructure, security, and data gravity challenges that legacy architectures were not designed to handle.
F5 has evolved its application delivery controller (ADC) capabilities into the unified Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) to address the realities of modern, AI-enabled enterprise architectures.
F5 enhances security with AI
The platform integrates full-lifecycle API security, identity-aware traffic management, and adaptive threat detection to safeguard these environments without compromising performance or agility.
F5’s platform-neutral approach addresses data gravity by converging networking, security, and compute-aware services into a programmable platform that bridges traditional infrastructure with emerging AI topologies. This supports secure, low-latency AI deployments that are critical for industries like finance, healthcare, and the public sector. The F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform gives organizations single-policy management, AI-powered anomaly detection, and context-rich observability.
It embeds encrypted traffic inspection, behavioral AI for fraud detection, and adaptive access control into the same pipeline as application delivery. In financial services, institutions are using AI for fraud detection and customer personalization. F5’s telemetry and API governance capabilities help these institutions reduce false positives while maintaining compliance and performance SLAs.
In healthcare, F5 ensures that sensitive data and mission-critical services remain available, compliant, and secure. With programmable data planes, lifecycle automation, and embedded AI models for traffic and threat prediction, F5’s ADSP is purpose-built to help enterprises scale securely into the AI era. The ADC, once seen as a mere traffic router, is now taking center stage as a platform for innovation, resilience, and control in the AI age.
Rashan is a seasoned technology journalist and visionary leader serving as the Editor-in-Chief of DevX.com, a leading online publication focused on software development, programming languages, and emerging technologies. With his deep expertise in the tech industry and her passion for empowering developers, Rashan has transformed DevX.com into a vibrant hub of knowledge and innovation. Reach out to Rashan at [email protected]
