Securitas Acquires Liferaft: What OSINT Buyers Should Know

Securitas signed a binding agreement to acquire Liferaft on February 3, 2026. If you’re a Liferaft customer, you already know what that probably means. If you’re evaluating OSINT platforms right now, this changes the shortlist.

Here’s what happened, why it matters, and what to do about it.

The Deal

Securitas is one of the world’s largest security services companies — physical guards, electronic security, fire and safety. Liferaft’s Navigator platform serves corporate security teams, security firms, and law enforcement agencies for social media monitoring and open source intelligence. The acquisition brings Liferaft’s digital capabilities into Securitas’ physical security portfolio.

On paper, this makes sense. Securitas gets a software asset that complements their manned guarding and electronic security operations. Liferaft gets resources, distribution, and a parent company with 345,000 employees globally.

In practice, history tells a different story.

The Pattern Nobody Wants to Talk About

Liferaft isn’t the first OSINT or DRP platform to get acquired. Not even close.

ZeroFox went public via SPAC in August 2022 at a $1.4 billion enterprise value. By May 2024, Haveli Investments took them private for approximately $350 million — a 75% decline. Digital Shadows was absorbed into ReliaQuest’s GreyMatter platform in 2022. IntSights was folded into Rapid7. PhishLabs went to HelpSystems (now Fortra). Proofpoint was acquired by Thoma Bravo for $12.3 billion.

Every acquisition followed the same playbook.

What happens post-acquisition

Engineering teams shrink. The acquirer’s strategic priorities override the original product roadmap. Features that mattered to the startup’s early customers get deprioritized in favor of capabilities that serve the parent company’s broader portfolio. Integration projects consume the remaining development bandwidth.

Customer success teams get restructured. Your dedicated account manager who knew your deployment inside-out gets replaced by a generalist covering a much larger book of business. Response times increase. Pricing goes up at renewal as the new owners optimize for profitability.

None of this is speculation. It’s the documented trajectory of every major DRP acquisition in the past four years.

Why this one feels different

Most prior acquisitions involved one software company absorbing another. Securitas is a physical security services conglomerate. The culture gap between a $15+ billion global manned guarding operation and a Canadian OSINT software startup is significant.

Software companies acquiring software companies at least share engineering DNA. When a physical security conglomerate acquires a software platform, the platform becomes a line item in a much larger services business. The question isn’t whether the product will change — it’s how fast.

What Liferaft Customers Should Do Right Now

Don’t panic, but don’t ignore this either. Get answers in writing before your next renewal.

Questions for your account team

Data continuity. Will your existing data, saved searches, entity configurations, and historical archives survive the transition? What happens to your data if you decide to leave during the integration?

Contract terms. Is your current pricing locked through your contract term? What happens at renewal — does pricing move to a Securitas structure?

Product roadmap. Which planned features will still be developed? Are any capabilities being deprecated or merged into Securitas-specific products? Will Navigator remain standalone?

Support structure. Will your current support contacts and SLAs remain intact? What’s the transition timeline?

Integration mandate. Will customers be required to migrate to a Securitas-integrated platform at any point? What does that migration look like?

Get these answers in writing. Verbal assurances from account managers who may not be there in six months are not enough.

Evaluating Alternatives: What Actually Matters

If you’re exploring options — whether as a current Liferaft customer or a new buyer who had Liferaft on your shortlist — here’s what separates platforms in practice:

Collection infrastructure. Does the vendor operate first-party collection, or are they reselling third-party data? First-party means faster time-to-intelligence, more control over coverage, and direct accountability for data quality.

Classification depth. How does the platform classify incoming intelligence? A published taxonomy with specific risk domains and scenario types beats a black-box “AI-powered” claim every time. Ask to see the taxonomy. If the vendor can’t show it, that tells you something.

Pricing model. Per-seat pricing punishes team growth. Entity-based pricing scales with your monitoring scope, not your headcount. For security firms managing multiple clients, this distinction determines whether the platform becomes more affordable or more expensive as you grow.

Vendor independence. Is the company independently owned with a product-led roadmap? Or is it PE-backed, recently acquired, or a feature inside a larger platform? Independence doesn’t guarantee success, but it guarantees that your vendor’s product team is focused on your use cases — not on integration projects for a parent company.

Time to value. How long until you receive your first classified alert? Enterprise DRP deployments that require weeks of professional services are paying for a platform that isn’t producing value during the window when urgency is highest.

The Bigger Picture

The OSINT and digital risk protection market is consolidating fast. The number of independent, product-led platforms is shrinking every year. Every acquisition reduces buyer choice and concentrates capability in companies optimizing for financial returns, not product innovation.

For security teams making long-term platform commitments, ownership structure is no longer a nice-to-have evaluation criterion. It’s a material risk factor.

Choose vendors that control their own engineering roadmap, publish transparent pricing, and aren’t one board meeting away from a strategic pivot that has nothing to do with your security program.

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We’ve published a detailed side-by-side comparison of DigitalStakeout and Liferaft for teams evaluating their options. Or see the platform live with your own entities.

Competitor information based on publicly available sources as of February 2026. Securitas acquisition details sourced from public press releases.