Are New AI Partnerships Powering CrowdStrike's Next Growth Wave?

CrowdStrike (CRWD) is adding new AI-focused partnerships that support its plan to grow as a broad cybersecurity platform. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026, around 60% of new business came through partners, showing the importance of strategic partnerships to the company’s growth strategy. Furthermore, CrowdStrike's recent deals with CoreWeave, EY, and NVIDIA highlight the company’s efforts to secure AI workloads, modernize security operations and enable real-time threat detection across different environments.

The CoreWeave partnership, announced earlier this month, brings Falcon security to CoreWeave’s AI cloud. This collaboration expands the company’s reach into a real-world AI production environment, enabling the company to protect the entire AI ecosystem where AI models are built, trained and deployed.

In November 2025, EY selected CrowdStrike’s Falcon Next-Gen Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as the base for its global managed services to help more enterprises move off older SIEM tools. This bodes well for CrowdStrike’s Next-Gen SIEM business, which is already growing fast. During the second quarter, annual recurring revenues for Next-Gen SIEM rose more than 95% year over year, reaching more than $430 million, supported by faster onboarding and lower data costs.

CrowdStrike’s NVIDIA partnership, announced in October 2025, expands the company’s push into agentic AI. The two companies will deliver always-on, continuously learning AI agents for real-time threat detection across cloud, data center and edge environments. This aligns favorably with CrowdStrike’s progress with Charlotte AI, which grew more than 85% from the previous quarter as customers used more automated SOC features.

Together, these above-mentioned partnerships support CrowdStrike’s platform strategy. Moreover, expanding the AI ecosystem may help CrowdStrike increase adoption across its platform and maintain its growth momentum, which bodes well for the company’s prospects. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for both fiscal 2026 and 2027 revenues indicates a year-over-year increase of around 21%.

How Competitors Fare Against CRWD

Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and Okta Inc. (OKTA) are key players competing with CrowdStrike, which are focusing on acquisitions for platform expansion and AI innovation.

Palo Alto Networks’ pending acquisition of CyberArk Software would strengthen the company’s foothold in a category where it currently lacks scale. Identity-driven threat protection has remained a weaker link for Palo Alto Networks. By integrating CyberArk Software’s capabilities, Palo Alto Networks would be able to deliver a more comprehensive and unified platform that spans cloud, endpoint, network and identity protection.

Okta completed its acquisition of Axiom Security in September 2025. Through this acquisition, Okta has added new tools for privileged access management, helping customers control who can reach sensitive cloud, SaaS and database systems.

CRWD’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of CrowdStrike have gained 43.4% year to date compared with the Zacks Security industry’s growth of 11.2%.

CRWD YTD Price Return Performance

From a valuation standpoint, CrowdStrike trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 21.97, way higher than the industry’s average of 11.97.

CRWD Forward 12-Month P/S Ratio

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for CrowdStrike’s fiscal 2026 earnings implies a year-over-year decline of 6.6%, while the same for fiscal 2027 earnings indicates year-over-year growth of 29.3%. The estimates for fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027 have remained unchanged over the past 60 days.

CrowdStrike currently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report

This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

Zacks Investment Research