Taking a step forward for its vision of Intrinsic Security, VMware has agreed to acquire Lastline Inc., an anti-malware research startup. The acquisition is likely to close in VMware’s Q2 FY21 ending July 31, 2020.

VMware expects the acquisition to further take advantage of the intrinsic attributes of its virtualization platform to yield innovative security capabilities.

“Upon close of the deal, we will bring a world class team of network-focused anti-malware researchers and developers, and go-to-market security experts, into the NSX team,” Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of VMware’s networking and security business unit, said in a blog post.

He added that VMware NSX has deep visibility into network traffic, touching every packet. The NSX architecture will help Lastline perform network analytics at massive scale, across tens of thousands of cores, without the burden of tapping network traffic. Furthermore, NSX has an intrinsic understanding of application topology and speaks Layer 7.

Lastline boasts several of the top 10 most published security threat researchers globally.

“As one combined company, we will be able to offer an even broader array of integrated security solutions for both networking and security, and complement many of VMware’s established solutions for cloud, data center, end user, and workload protection,” added Lastline Chief Executive John DiLullo while sharing his excitement about the next chapter at Lastline.

In recent years, Lastline is said to have enjoyed tremendous growth, acclaim for its AI-based threat detection capabilities, and most recently, recognition for pioneering successes with our Network Detection and Response (NDR) and Public Cloud security solutions.