Aqua Security has closed its Series E funding round and delivered $ 1 billion valuation to scale from 410 customers today to thousands of customers within a few years.
Israeli-based cloud security startup Ramat Gan said it must continue to improve its product, gain additional customers, and educate the market about indigenous cloud security in order to make an initial public offering there. the year or two, according to co-founder and CEO Dror Davidoff. The $ 135 million Aqua round was led by new investor ION Crossover Partners, and will bring the company’s total funding to $ 265 million.
“We have proven that we have the best product on the market,” Davidoff told CRN. “Now we need to expand our operations to take advantage of the opportunity. ”
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Aqua wants to grow its share of customers outside of North America from 20 percent today to 40 percent within the next year or two, Davidoff said. Historically, Europe has been a bit slower and more cautious about cloud adoption, but Davidoff has recently seen a transformation where major European organizations are willing to go for cloud technology. .
At the same time, Asia-Pacific has not received much investment from Aqua, but Davidoff said the company is starting to focus more on its efforts to take advantage of the huge opportunity in the region. . Aqua expects to grow its workforce from 300 people today to 450 people by the end of 2021, with new employers focused on sales and marketing as well as standing up an engineering center in the eastern US
In terms of messenger size, Davidoff said Aqua has traditionally been optimized for larger scale enterprises that have knowledge of new technology, knowledge of how to secure them, and are looking for advanced and advanced security offers.
But Davidoff now said Aqua has open source products that are better suited to companies earlier on the cloud journey to address challenges around hygiene, highlighting vulnerabilities, and hardening their environment . Medium-sized and smaller companies tend to be as diverse as cloud services and technologies, and he said Aqua is better placed to serve companies at different levels of maturity.
Historically, Aqua has been stronger in finance, sales, media and defense, and found that financial companies were embracing the company’s technology early because of the level of regulation that ahead, Davidoff said. Davidoff recently said that software and IoT vendors have turned to Aqua, while car dealers are seeking help consolidating the amount of software they are developing.
From a technology standpoint, Davidoff said Aqua has big plans to strengthen its Kubernetes security offering to address the growing security requirements surrounding the technology. The company also plans to make major investments around improving security around cloud infrastructure as code-based infrastructure (IaC) becomes more prevalent in the industry, according to Davidoff.
And going forward, Davidoff expects that there will be additional runtime technologies that Aqua will need to acquire as new types of work come out beyond vessels, serverless and lightweight virtual machines. All said, Davidoff hopes Aqua funding will drive more customer purchases, better coverage of cloud security issues, and greater use of the company’s technology by the open source community.
“Anyone running in the cloud needs good security,” said Davidoff.