- Lacework — a security platform for the cloud generation — announced recently that it has raised a $525 million growth round with a valuation of $1 billion. These are the details.
Lacework — a security platform for the cloud generation — announced recently that it has raised a $525 million growth round with a valuation of $1 billion. This round of funding — which was led by Sutter Hill and Altimeter Capital, and joined by D1 Capital Partners, Coatue, Dragoneer Investment Group, Liberty Global Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and Tiger Global Management — reflects Lacework’s accelerated adoption among digital businesses building on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Kubernetes.
The company’s platform is used by cloud-based businesses like Brightcove, Lendingtree, Veeva, and Pure Storage. And the investment round will be used to accelerate the strategies that drove Lacework’s 300%+ revenue growth in 2020, expand its go-to-market and partner ecosystem operations, and grow its engineering and R&D teams across the US and Europe.
Lacework was built for seeing and understanding cloud changes at scale without requiring manual interventions by security teams every time a new cloud service or technology is adopted. And it gives customers the visibility, context, and telemetry needed to quickly assess cloud security postures, prove compliance, secure cloud workloads, and investigate anomalous activity or answer an auditor’s question all in one place.
Lacework’s platform is built on Snowflake and its Polygraph security architecture understands and detects threats in cloud applications and infrastructure by applying automation and machine learning for tackling the scale of security data processing required to record and analyze constant changes in the cloud. And as a result, Lacework customers are able to reduce false positives by up to 98% and investigation time by over 90%. With functionality that reaches across the Cloud Security Posture and Cloud Protection Platform markets, 80% of new Lacework customers replaced 2 or more point products in 2020.
The next phase of Lacework’s growth is going to focus on extending its market-leading SaaS security platform and expanding into adjacent new spaces, all with a focus on enabling customers to innovate in the cloud with speed and safety. And the investment will enable Lacework to deliver additional integration across the devops toolchain and into security data lake initiatives for Snowflake customers.
KEY QUOTES:
“Building on cloud is the biggest shift the IT industry has ever witnessed. Constant cloud changes require a new approach to security that is critical for our customers for adapting and scaling as fast as cloud innovation. This round will allow us to extend our product differentiation leadership which is critical in a transformative market driven by both fast-moving builders and sophisticated attackers.”
— Dan Hubbard, Lacework CEO
“The best way to understand the security of any business is to have data for all activity and process it with the lowest latency, regardless of scale. Lacework’s automation of manual processes and ability to map and analyze cloud changes with their Polygraph demonstrates the power of modern data processing on Snowflake.”
— Christian Kleinerman, SVP Products, Snowflake
“We invest in companies that leverage and drive fundamental technological shifts in massive markets. Lacework is a better approach to security built on Snowflake’s powerful data platform to deliver radically better security to our enterprise customers. And, like Snowflake, at a similar point in its evolution, Lacework is growing revenue at over 300% per year making Lacework one of Sutter Hill Ventures’ most important and promising portfolio companies.”
— Mike Speiser, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
“Lacework, enabled WEX to accelerate our AWS migration with a proactive view of activity while keeping our configuration house in order without the cost and toil of trying to do the same thing with a SIEM. We are also supporting container projects without having to manage and scale additional infrastructure, enabling more resources for collaboration and product development.”
— David Christensen, Director of Global Information Security Engineering and Operations, WEX
“Our business infrastructure runs on thousands of servers constantly scaling up and down. Lacework has enabled our security team to shift from building and managing security infrastructure to security practitioners who collaborate on near real-time data that enables our teams to focus on what matters.”
— Terence Runge, CISO, Reltio
“Lacework is the first tool I have encountered that can drop in, zero in on anomalous behavior, and support a blue team’s defense vs red team attempts to execute a breach and extend access. I rely on it for my production environments, and I highly recommend it to others who are serious about security.”
— Brad Woodward, Principal Security Architect, Observian
“Integrating New Relic with Lacework means you can harness the power of observability plus behaviors for deep insights into your cloud security posture. This unique combination helps to reduce MTTD and MTTR.”
— Raj Ramanujam, VP of Alliances and Channels, New Relic
