Sutter Hill Ventures Backs Lacework in $525M Round

January 7, 2021

Lacework landed a $525 million growth round with a valuation of over $1 billion. Led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Altimeter Capital, and joined by D1 Capital Partners, Coatue, Dragoneer Investment Group, Liberty Global Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Tiger Global Management, the round reflects Lacework’s accelerated adoption among digital businesses building on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes.

Lacework is trusted by cloud-based businesses such as Brightcove, LendingTree, Veeva Systems, and Pure Storage. 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.

Dan Hubbard, CEO, Lacework said, “Building on cloud is the biggest shift the IT industry has ever witnessed. Constant cloud changes require a new approach to security critical for our customers adapting and scaling as fast as clouds innovate. 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.”

Christian Kleinerman, SVP Products, Snowflake added, ”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.”

Constant Changes in the Cloud Require a Fundamental Shift In Security with Data Processing at Scale

Applications built on cloud infrastructure services are complex and change constantly, which makes securing cloud workloads and services at scale impossible when relying on manual tasks and disparate tooling. With the worldwide adoption of public cloud infrastructure as a service forecasted to grow from $51 Billion in 2020 to $82 Billion in 2022, comes a heightened demand for cloud security and compliance. Gartner, Inc. also anticipates that “99% of all cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault through at least 2023,” with 50% of companies unintentionally exposing components of their own cloud applications and infrastructure to the internet in 2021, up from 25% in 2018.

Lacework was built to see and understand cloud changes at scale without requiring manual interventions by security teams every time a new cloud service or technology is adopted. 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 is built on Snowflake, and its Polygraph™ security architecture understands and detects threats in cloud applications and infrastructure by applying automation and machine learning to tackle the massive scale of security data processing required to record and analyze constant changes in the cloud. 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 two or more point products in 2020.

The next phase of Lacework’s growth will focus on extending its market-leading SaaS security platform and expanding into new adjacent spaces, all with a focus on enabling customers to innovate in the cloud with speed and safety. Furthermore, the investment will enable Lacework to deliver additional integrations across the devops toolchain and into security data lake initiatives for Snowflake customers.

Mike Speiser, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures: “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."

David Christensen, Director of Global Information Security Engineering and Operations, WEX: “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.”

Terence Runge, CISO, Reltio: "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.”
Brad Woodward, Principal Security Architect, Observian: “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."

Raj Ramanujam, VP of Alliances and Channels, New Relic: “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."