Mastercard acquires threat intelligence provider Recorded Future for $2.65B

Mastercard Inc. today announced plans to acquire Recorded Future Inc., the world’s largest provider of information about hacker activities. 

The $2.65 billion deal likely represents a sizable return for Insight Partners, which spent $780 million five years ago to buy a controlling interest in Recorded Future. At the time, the cybersecurity provider had more than 400 customers. Today, it boasts about five times as many, which may have been one factor behind the acquisition’s steep price tag.

Mastercard’s namesake payment card network facilitated $9 trillion worth of transactions last year. Alongside infrastructure for processing purchases, the company provides services designed to help enterprises and financial institutions detect cybercrime such as fraud. The acquisition of Recorded Future will help the company expand that part of its product portfolio.

Somerville, Massachusetts-based Recorded Future launched in 2009 with funding from Google LLC and other institutional backers. It raised additional capital from Insight Partners in 2017 before selling a controlling stake to the investment firm two years later. Following the acquisition, Recorded Future’s installed base grew from more than 400 organizations to over 1,900 and its annual revenue surpassed $300 million. 

The company provides a threat intelligence platform that organizations use to track hacking campaigns. An enterprise can use data from the platform to identify how many cybercrime groups are targeting its industry, what breach tactics they’re using and which cyberattacks pose the biggest risk. Recorded Future says that it regularly scans over one million servers used by hackers to coordinate malware campaigns.

The company’s platform also provides access to other types of cybersecurity data. It can scan an organization’s network to find publicly-facing systems that contain known vulnerabilities or misconfigured security settings. Recorded Future is likewise capable of spotting weak points in the infrastructure of a company’s partners.

Alongside raw cybersecurity data, the company provides tools that help customers put that data to use. Recorded Future’s platform uses OpenAI language models to automatically summarize threat information for cybersecurity teams. Additionally, it includes dashboards that visualize cybersecurity metrics to ease analysis. 

Mastercard’s acquisition of Recorded Future comes a few months after the companies launched a jointly-developed tool for spotting compromised payment cards. According to the financial services giant, the tool has “doubled the rate” at which such cards are identified. Besides Mastercard, Recorded Future’s installed base includes more than half the Fortune 100 and the governments of 45 countries. 

Acquiring Recorded Future will enable Mastercard to more closely align the former company’s engineering efforts with its product roadmap. The deal also removes the possibility of a competitor swooping in with an acquisition offer.

 “Recorded Future adds to how we deliver that greater peace of mind before, during and after the payment transaction,” said Mastercard Chief Services Officer Craig Vosburg. “Together we will innovate faster, create smarter models and anticipate emerging threats before cyberattacks can take place.”

Mastercard expects to complete the acquisition by the first quarter of 2025.

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