Who owns CrowdStrike? Ownership structure explained (2026)

CrowdStrike sells cybersecurity software that runs on a single lightweight agent installed on laptops, servers, and cloud workloads. That agent, called Falcon, is also the reason most people outside the security industry have heard of the company. On July 19, 2024, a faulty Falcon update crashed millions of Windows machines around the world and grounded flights, froze hospitals, and knocked banks offline. The incident turned an obscure enterprise vendor into a household name overnight, and it reshaped how investors, customers, and regulators think about the company.

Ownership matters here because CrowdStrike is a business built on trust. Its software holds privileged access to the most sensitive systems its customers run. Who controls the company, who sits on its board, and who can push it toward short-term decisions all feed into the question of whether that trust is well placed. The ownership structure also tells the story of how a startup seeded by a private equity firm grew into one of the largest security companies in the world.

This article breaks down who owns CrowdStrike: its founders, its institutional shareholders, the people in control, and the events that shaped the cap table.

CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. Kurtz, the former chief technology officer of McAfee, started the company as an entrepreneur in residence at Warburg Pincus, which wrote the first check. The company was incorporated in Delaware and originally operated out of California. It later moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas.

The core product is the Falcon platform, a cloud-delivered system that detects and blocks cyberattacks on endpoints, cloud infrastructure, and identities. CrowdStrike sells it as a subscription, and the recurring nature of that revenue is central to its valuation. In fiscal 2026, which ended January 31, 2026, the company reported total revenue of $4.81 billion, up 22 percent year over year. Annual recurring revenue reached $5.51 billion as of April 30, 2026.

CrowdStrike went public on the Nasdaq in June 2019. As of August 2026, its market capitalization sat near $192 billion, making it one of the most valuable pure-play cybersecurity companies in the market.

CrowdStrike is an independent public company. It has no parent, and no single investor controls it. Its shares trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker CRWD. Ownership is split among institutional investors, company insiders, and retail shareholders, with institutions holding the largest share.

In July 2026, CrowdStrike completed a four-for-one stock split, distributed as a stock dividend on its Class A common stock. The split lowered the per-share price but did not change any shareholder's proportional ownership.

At its IPO, CrowdStrike used a dual-class share structure. Class A shares carried one vote each, and Class B shares carried ten votes each. The Class B shares were held by pre-IPO insiders, including founders, executives, directors, and early investors, which concentrated voting power with the people who built the company.

That structure no longer exists. On December 11, 2024, all outstanding Class B shares automatically converted into Class A shares under a sunset provision in CrowdStrike's charter. The company now operates on a one share, one vote basis. As of the April 2026 record date, there were about 254.5 million Class A shares outstanding, each entitled to a single vote. This is a meaningful change: George Kurtz and other insiders no longer hold outsized voting control, and every share now carries equal weight.

CrowdStrike does not publish a simple ownership percentage for each founder, and the picture has changed over time as executives sell shares and receive new equity grants. What is confirmed comes from company proxy filings.

George Kurtz remains the largest individual insider holder. Company filings put his beneficial ownership at roughly 2 to 3 percent of shares outstanding, including unvested restricted stock units. At CrowdStrike's 2026 valuation, that stake is worth several billion dollars. Dmitri Alperovitch retains a smaller equity position but has no board seat or operational role since his 2020 departure. Gregg Marston, the founding CFO, left day-to-day operations years ago. Founder equity in aggregate is a minority of the company, a normal outcome after multiple venture rounds and a large public float.

Before going public, CrowdStrike raised about $481 million across several venture rounds. The table below traces the major rounds. Amounts and valuations are drawn from company disclosures and contemporaneous reporting, and some early figures are approximate.

Institutional investors own roughly 70 percent of CrowdStrike, a typical profile for a large, index-heavy technology stock. The largest holders are passive asset managers whose stakes track the company's weight in major indexes.

Vanguard Group is the single largest holder, with a stake in the high single digits as a share of the company. BlackRock, counting its affiliated fund entities, holds a comparable combined position. Together the two firms control roughly a quarter of CrowdStrike's outstanding shares. State Street rounds out the trio of major index managers. Active managers such as Jennison Associates and large brokerages including Morgan Stanley hold additional meaningful positions. None of these investors runs the company; their votes matter at annual meetings, but they are financial owners rather than operators.

The early venture backers, Warburg Pincus, Accel, and CapitalG, held large pre-IPO stakes but have sold down significantly since 2019. Warburg Pincus owned about 30 percent of the company at the IPO, Accel about 20 percent, and CapitalG, the growth arm of Alphabet, about 11 percent.

George Kurtz is the co-founder and chief executive officer. He has led CrowdStrike since 2011 and is the public face of the company. His continued tenure is a central factor in how the business is run, and CrowdStrike's filings treat his departure or incapacity as a material risk.

Michael Sentonas serves as president, a role focused on product and go-to-market execution. He was promoted into the position in 2023 after years leading the company's technology strategy.

The board of directors sets governance and oversight. It includes Kurtz alongside independent directors drawn from technology, finance, and government backgrounds. With the dual-class structure now retired, the board answers to a shareholder base where every vote counts equally, which strengthens the influence of large institutional holders relative to the pre-2025 setup. What is confirmed is the one share, one vote framework; the specific balance of power inside the boardroom is not something outside observers can measure precisely.

On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike pushed a faulty configuration update to its Falcon sensor. The update crashed Windows machines running the software, producing the blue screen of death on an estimated 8.5 million systems worldwide. Airlines grounded flights, hospitals delayed procedures, banks and broadcasters went dark, and the disruption rippled across nearly every industry that relies on Windows endpoints. It ranks among the largest IT outages in history, and the root cause was a defect in CrowdStrike's own software rather than a cyberattack.

The financial and reputational fallout was severe. CrowdStrike's stock fell sharply in the weeks after the incident, wiping out a large share of its market value before it recovered. The company issued a detailed post-incident review, changed how it tests and staggers updates, and offered customer commitments to rebuild trust. The episode is a case study in concentration risk: software that sits everywhere can fail everywhere at once. For readers tracking how organizations plan for events like this, the scale of the outage lines up with broader business continuity statistics, and the risk it exposed is exactly the kind that a risk register template is designed to track.

The outage produced lawsuits. Delta Air Lines was the most prominent plaintiff. Delta said the failure forced it to cancel about 7,000 flights, disrupt roughly 1.4 million passengers, and absorb hundreds of millions of dollars in costs and lost revenue. Delta sued CrowdStrike in Georgia state court, alleging breach of contract, negligence, and gross negligence. CrowdStrike countersued and disputed the damages, arguing its contract capped liability. In 2025, a judge allowed Delta's gross negligence claim to proceed, a ruling that kept the largest customer dispute alive. Other customers pursued their own claims, and the litigation remained unresolved into 2026.

Investors also sued. Following the outage and the stock drop, shareholders filed securities class action claims alleging that CrowdStrike had overstated the quality and safety of its update and testing processes. Suits of this kind are common after a sharp price decline, and they add legal cost and management distraction on top of the customer litigation. These cases center on what the company disclosed about its software reliability before July 2024.

CrowdStrike's ownership structure shapes how the company weathers a crisis. When the July 2024 outage hit, there was no controlling shareholder to force a fire sale or a rushed leadership change, and no parent company to absorb or amplify the damage. A broad institutional base, dominated by long-term index funds, gave the company room to recover on its own timeline rather than under pressure from an activist owner. That stability is a feature of a widely held public company, and it worked in CrowdStrike's favor when trust was the thing most in question.

The retirement of the dual-class structure in late 2024 changed the balance of power. For its first five years as a public company, CrowdStrike concentrated voting control with founders and insiders through high-vote Class B shares. That arrangement let Kurtz and the early team steer the company without much risk of outside interference. Now that every share carries one vote, large institutional holders such as Vanguard and BlackRock carry more weight, and the board is more directly accountable to the full shareholder base. For a company whose product depends on customer confidence, tighter accountability is not a small thing.

Ownership also affects customers and the wider market. CrowdStrike's software sits at the center of thousands of organizations' security stacks, so the company's incentives matter to people who never buy its stock. A public company under scrutiny from institutional investors, securities regulators, and litigation faces real pressure to invest in reliability and disclosure. The outage showed how much can go wrong when a single vendor holds privileged access at scale, and the ownership structure is one of the mechanisms that keeps that vendor answerable for it.

Finally, the cap table reflects a broader pattern in enterprise software. CrowdStrike was seeded by a private equity firm, scaled by venture and growth investors, and then handed to the public markets, where index funds became its largest owners. That arc mirrors other high-growth security and data companies, from Palantir to defense-tech peers like Anduril and enterprise platforms like Databricks. Understanding who owns CrowdStrike is a way of understanding how modern software companies are financed and controlled.

George Kurtz is the co-founder and chief executive officer of CrowdStrike. He has led the company since he founded it in 2011 and remains its largest individual insider shareholder.

Yes. CrowdStrike trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker CRWD. It went public in June 2019 and had a market capitalization of roughly $192 billion in August 2026. To put a figure like that in context, a business valuation calculator shows how revenue and growth translate into an enterprise value.

CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. Kurtz is the CEO. Alperovitch, the former chief technology officer, left in 2020 to run the Silverado Policy Accelerator. Marston was the founding chief financial officer.

Institutional investors own roughly 70 percent of CrowdStrike. The largest holders are Vanguard and BlackRock, which together control about a quarter of the company. State Street, Morgan Stanley, and active managers such as Jennison Associates hold additional large positions.

No. CrowdStrike is an independent public company with no parent. It is owned by its public shareholders, a mix of institutional investors, insiders, and retail holders.

Before its 2019 IPO, CrowdStrike raised about $481 million from venture and growth investors. Warburg Pincus held roughly 30 percent of the company at the IPO, Accel about 20 percent, and CapitalG, the growth arm of Alphabet, about 11 percent. All three have sold down their stakes since then.