F5 Brings Advanced AI Guardrails to Large Enterprises with CalypsoAI Acquisition

F5, the global leader in delivering and securing every app and API, has announced its intent to acquire CalypsoAI, a pioneer in enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) security. CalypsoAI’s award-winning platform brings real-time threat defence, red teaming at scale, and data security to enterprises racing to deploy generative and agentic AI. These capabilities will be integrated into the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) to create the most complete solution for securing AI inference.

“AI is redefining enterprise architecture—and the attack surface companies must defend,” said François Locoh-Donou, President and CEO of F5. “Traditional firewalls and point solutions can’t keep up. The addition of CalypsoAI will give enterprises the confidence to innovate faster and better protect critical data as they rely on F5 to deliver and secure apps, APIs, and AI models across their environment.”

Enterprises are rapidly embedding AI into products and operations, but the new AI stack—spanning applications, agents, APIs, models, and data stores—creates a new and highly dynamic attack surface. Traditional controls are not keeping pace with sophisticated new threats, while mounting regulatory pressure alongside the spread of shadow AI usage heightens risk and compliance gaps. Security teams need a purpose-built and model-agnostic approach that provides guardrails for how AI interacts with data, users, and threats and provides centralised visibility across their infrastructure.

In their recent Market Guide on AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (TRiSM), Gartner® states, “The AI TRiSM market is distinguished by its independence from frontier model provider solutions that also support trust risk and security management. Enterprises must retain independence from any single AI model or hosting provider to ensure scalability, flexibility, cost control and trust, as AI markets rapidly mature and change.” 1

F5 is aiming to tackle this need with CalypsoAI’s adaptive AI security capabilities that deliver proactive and continuous AI protection regardless of model or cloud, including:

• Adversarial threat protection: Protection against new AI threats like prompt injection and jailbreak attacks with real-time threat management. Proactive red-teaming tests against more than 10,000 new attack prompts each month to produce a risk score.
• Secure data: Guardrails detect and prevent sensitive data leakage and policy violations at runtime and audit AI interactions across models.
• Unified visibility and governance: Centralised observability, policy control, and audit logs make it easier to meet GDPR/EU AI Act requirements across SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments.

“Enterprises want to move fast with AI while reducing the risk of data leaks, unsafe outputs, or compliance failures,” said Donnchadh Casey, CEO of CalypsoAI. “Our customers rely on us to pressure test AI systems at scale, set inference layer guardrails that adapt as models change, and to gain visibility and auditability across their AI estate. F5 and CalypsoAI are more than the sum of their parts: high performance application delivery and AI security that enable businesses to deliver innovation faster without increasing risk.”

Transaction Details of F5’s CalypsoAI Acquisition

F5 will acquire all issued and outstanding shares of CalypsoAI, a private company with major operations in Dublin, Ireland for USD $180 million in purchase consideration financed primarily with cash. The transaction is expected to be immaterial to F5’s revenue and operating results.