Lacework, the cloud security platform for enterprise innovation, today announced important funding and leadership changes that will help the company capitalize on its current momentum in delivering DevOps and workload security for cloud, container, and hybrid environments. Lacework is receiving $42 million from Sutter Hill Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures, and has hired cloud security veteran, Andy Byron, as President to run all go-to-market functions. Additionally, the company has added two new board members, Mike Speiser, partner at Sutter Hill Ventures, and John McMahon, cloud industry veteran and current Snowflake board member. 

With the addition of new forward-thinking customers like HashiCorp, Iterable and AdRoll, Lacework is making significant progress in helping major brands get visibility and understanding into the vulnerabilities from DevOps to workload run-time operations. The new funding and leadership changes will support product innovation and go-to-market activities to help educate security, compliance, and DevOps teams that want a way to embed security continuously through build-time to run-time operations.

"Our new funding, new perspectives on the board of directors, and with Andy joining, are all going to be critical for how we build on our solid foundation as a cloud and container security leader," said Dan Hubbard, CEO of Lacework. "Lacework, and our growing list of customers, agree that there is a need for a new generation of security companies that are purpose-fit to secure today's modern infrastructure. Lacework embodies this New Generation approach, born in the cloud and fortunate to see a similar mindset in our customer base on a daily basis as they build and transform both their technology and Security / DevOps culture."

Despite marketing collateral and cyber-hype, the vast majority of security products are not built nor designed as platforms. The other unfortunate truth is that they continue to be duct taped acquisitions of product-based companies that are better served as features within a platform. This has led us down a path of companies touting platforms that in-reality are multiple products glued together or scenarios where the average company has dozens of disparate systems, none of which work together leading to inefficiencies in investments, labor, complexity, and efficacy.

New Generation Security is about leveraging an ever-increasing set of functionality over-time all built with the same principals, data-stores, interfaces, and all delivered in an easy to consume SaaS platform.

"We believe cloud infrastructure is a fundamental part of the digital revolution - and so securing it is very critical. Lacework has the best cloud security product and also a world class team to deliver on this promise. We look forward to working closely with them," said Ankur Prakash, Partner at Liberty Global Ventures.

Andy Byron as President

Andy Byron joins Lacework to lead the sales and marketing teams in acquisition of new customers and branding the company as a leader in the cloud and container security market. He brings a track record of go-to-market success with innovative, fast growth startup companies. Prior to Lacework, Byron led sales and marketing as Chief Revenue Officer at Cybereason, a $100 million endpoint security company, and before that was President and Chief Operating Officer at Fuze.

"This is a unique opportunity, and I'm honored to have the chance to be part of Lacework and its new generation security platform," said Byron. "We are building a first-class sales and marketing team to bring our message of cloud and container security, from DevOps to runtime, to buyers who are hungry for a complete platform solution. Customers clearly don't want to be stuck with  last generation vendors who are attempting to cobble together a variety of solutions. Lacework is delivering the right solution for these customers who want to move fast, be agile, and still be secure."

Newly Appointed Board Members

The addition of Speiser and McMahon to the Lacework board signals a recommitment by investors and the recognition among cloud leaders that the company is positioned to rapidly accelerate its market growth. Speiser was founding CEO of data warehousing and analytics innovator, Snowflake, and both gentlemen currently sit on the board of directors of Snowflake. Both have significant experience driving fast growing companies like Pure Storage, MongoDB, and others to multi-billion dollar valuations.

"The security market is crowded with point solutions and legacy vendors trying to become relevant for containers and the cloud," said Mike Speiser, partner at Sutter Hill Ventures and new Lacework board member. "It's clear that DevOps and security teams want a single platform for their security and compliance needs, and only Lacework provides that. The company is doing all the right things and is on track to become the Snowflake for security."