Thought Leadership
BlackBerry is selling its cybersecurity division Cylance. The purchase price of 160 million US dollars is significantly lower than the 1.4 billion dollars that the former smartphone pioneer paid for the company in 2018. The buyer is the US cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf.
Under the terms of the deal, BlackBerry will initially receive 80 million dollars in cash, with the remainder to follow one year later. In addition, BlackBerry will receive approximately 5.5 million shares of Arctic Wolf common stock. The transaction is expected to close in BlackBerry’s fourth fiscal quarter.
Cylance, founded in 2015 by former McAfee and Intel managers Stuart McClure and Ryan Permeh, was unable to hold its own in an increasingly competitive cyber security market. The company, whose software analyzes cyber threats with the help of AI, continuously lost market share.
BlackBerry CEO John Giammatteo attributes the failure to the market trend towards threat detection and response products – a segment in which Cylance is not represented. “Further development of Cylance would have required significant investment,” Giammatteo explained in a recent earnings release.
Loss-making business for BlackBerry
Cylance has increasingly become a burden for BlackBerry’s cybersecurity division. In the financial year to the end of February 2025, the unit posted a record loss of 51 million dollars. At the beginning of the year, BlackBerry CFO Tim Foote announced that investments from Cylance would be redirected to more profitable areas such as the secure communications business.
Arctic Wolf plans to further develop and fully support Cylance’s endpoint security products.“Endpoint security is a key priority for us as a company,” emphasized Dan Schiappa, CPO of Arctic Wolf, in a blog post.
