When enterprise technology company F5 wanted to expand its business, AI was the logical target.
It was becoming apparent that AI security was going to be a big market; F5’s estimates put that at more than $10 billion (€8.6 billion) in the next three to four years. And as F5 chief executive and president François Locoh-Donou says the company decided it needed to get in early.
“We had a conviction that we had to be in this market because F5, historically, we secure applications for the largest companies around the world – the big banks and telcos and healthcare and retail and manufacturing and technology companies,” he says. “Our speciality is securing their applications and delivering their applications.”
“So it was clear to us that the next type of applications were going to be AI applications, AI models or AI-powered applications. And we wanted to secure those AI models and applications as well.”
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But getting the necessary expertise wasn’t easy. AI is still an emerging technology, albeit a fast-moving one, and getting the right kind of talent isn’t straightforward. Acquisition was the logical step to get the talent they sought, and F5 had a shortlist of companies it wanted.
Dublin-based CalypsoAI was one of the names that made the shortlist.
“We have relationships with perhaps the most exacting customers around the world, including large financial services organisations. So when we come up with a shortlist of companies and say we’re interested in three or four companies, we had the privilege of being able to talk quietly to a few customers and ask who are the best ones?” Locoh-Donou says. “Through all these conversations and our own due diligence, Calypso AI emerged as the best AI security solution on the market.”
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Founded by Neil Serebryany in 2018, CalypsoAI developed an adaptive AI security platform for companies, allowing it to use AI technology including large-language models or generative AI while protecting their data. The idea was to ensure data remained secure, protecting organisations from data leaks and against online security threats known as jailbreaks, hallucinations and prompt injection attacks.
“In AI security, you have to protect every word that is going between a user and a model. And you have to really understand the words and the context,” Locoh-Donou says. “You can build a solution in AI security that works in English, but you take it to Spain or Italy or Argentina and it doesn’t work.
“Having people that speak multiple languages allows you to quickly develop your solution for different languages. One of the appeals of Ireland is the fact that you have people from all over Europe that come here, so you have multiple languages here.”
The deal was closed in September, making Calypso one of four acquisitions that F5 made in 2025.
There has been an adjustment period for staff. Although senior management has remained with the company, going from being a start-up like CalypsoAI where the pace is rapid to become part of a larger company, such as F5, can be a big change for the staff.
F5 has implemented a mechanism to accelerate the growth of start-ups within the company, which it calls “fast lane”. That involves regular check-ins with the Dublin management team to help remove the obstacles of a large company.
“Decisions about investment can be made very quickly. Something that would take a couple of months for approval takes actually a couple of hours. That direction can be given very quickly; we are aligned on the focus so that a small company like Calypso doesn’t get lost in the big shuffle of things,” Locoh-Donou says. “I think since we put that in place, the team here on the ground already feels the benefits of it. They feel the benefit of the acceleration of faster decisions and faster growth and investment.”
Acquisitions graduate out of the fast lane process on a case-by-case basis, he says, but generally as a rule of thumb, when something is going to represent more than 10 per cent of F5 revenues, it is well integrated and has a scale that is really material to F5.
“There may be things that stay in that fast lane even after they get to the 10 per cent, largely because we want to still maintain this hyper-focus, hyper-executive engagement in this area because it’s so strategic for the company that we want to keep it for a long time.”
The process has already been tested on the F5’s software as a service business. F5 was mainly a hardware and software company – deployable products on premise – until it established the unit a few years ago. Today, the SaaS business is worth about $200 million in annual recurring revenue, which is 6-7 per cent of total revenue.
“It is getting to a point where it may pass this threshold of 10 per cent in the future. And at that point, we’ll evaluate whether it still needs to be in the fast lane.”
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It remains to be seen how soon the former CalypsoAI business will “graduate”. The demand for its services is growing as companies seek to implement AI in a way that is safe and secure.
“There is a substantial top-down push from boardrooms, chief executives and top executives to push more adoption and usage of AI inside their companies,” he says. “Executives understand the potential benefits, the potential disruption, do not want to be left behind and so want their companies to keep up with the times.
“On the one hand, generally, employees in most companies want to start using AI and leveraging the tools more, but with some level of anxiety about ‘is AI coming from my job or not’. If you combine those two things, though, what it means is that a lot of companies have pressure to adopt AI very quickly, even though it’s a technology that’s quite vulnerable today and the vulnerabilities are not understood.”
The concerns around jobs are valid ones. Meta recently announced it would cut 8,000 jobs globally as a result of AI investment, and moved thousands of other employees into AI roles.
But Locoh-Donou says F5, which has an office in Cork, is continuing to recruit in Ireland. It employs more than 100 people here and anticipates growth of about 25-30 per cent in the near term.
It may not always be the traditional tech roles either, with new jobs such as prompt engineering requiring candidates with English majors because they have a specific ability to structure prompts to make them more effective.
“That is the talent we are looking for, as an example, or people who have experience with digital signal processing for audio because we want to build models that have what’s called multiple modalities, that understand not just text but audio and video,” he says. “I think that the team here is going to grow pretty substantially as fast as we can.”
As AI continues to grow in influence, so too will the security threats. And with companies pushing to implement the new technology, effective security solutions will be vital.
Locoh-Donou points to previous tech revolutions such as cloud, which took much longer to mature, allowing companies to get comfortable and address potential security issues over that time. AI, on the other hand, is being deployed rapidly and at scale.
That brings a new round of security issues to deal with, and ones that are increasingly complex.
“How you stay ahead of it is you use AI. I believe that AI at the moment is quite a vulnerable technology. It’s being deployed at scale. Every week, every month, you find new vulnerabilities,” he says. “So how do you first discover what the vulnerabilities are and then build remediation mitigation against it? One of the big things that we have innovated with Calypso AI is using AI agents to do that work. It has a technology that discovers 10,000 new attack vectors on AI models every single month. So every single month we are adding more than 10,000 new attack vectors to our library of attacks and automatically building 10,000 remediations for these attacks that go into our customers.
“We couldn’t do that just with humans.”
