Aqua holds fundraiser to address one of the biggest hurdles facing containers: security
Aqua Security, a provider of container security solutions, recently raised $25 million in a Series B funding, making it “the largest fundraising round to date in the container space,” according to the company. With the backing of investors like Microsoft Ventures, TLV Ventures and Shlomo Kramer, the total investment in Aqua now clocks in at $38.5 million.
Aqua was launched in May 2016. Since then, the company has acquired several Global 1000 customers, including two of the 10 biggest financial services companies and three of the top 10 software companies. Lightspeed Venture Partners headed the recent Series B round. Microsoft headed a Series A round last September, raising $9 million in the process, the company reports.
“We are thrilled to have Lightspeed on board for our next phase of growth,” said Dror Davidoff, CEO and co-founder at Aqua Security. “This investment is a huge vote of confidence in Aqua’s market leadership, vision, and execution. We look forward to fast–tracking our product development and global market presence as we continue on our quest to provide better, seamless application security for the cloud-native era.”
Containers are one of the most popular tools on the telecom scene today. The lightweight technology allows service providers to package large applications into bite size chunks of code, and run them on a host operating system. Despite the advantages of containers, securing the technology is by no means easy. Since containers share the same host operating system, it is fairly easier for intruders to gain access to the entire system. According to a 2016 survey of 301 IT professionals commissioned by ClusterHQ, a little over 60% of respondents cited security as either a major or moderate barrier to container adoption.
“The rapid rise and convergence of DevOps, containers, and microservices-based applications is an opportunity to rethink application security,” said Chris Schaepe partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Aqua’s success in leveraging containers to improve security provides visible customer value, as evident from the impressive customer adoption that the team at Aqua achieved in a very short time.”
The recent funding will allow the company to build upon its Aqua Container Security Platform, which provides security visibility over containerized environments. It can support Windows and Linux containers on premises, in addition to Amazon Web Services, Azure, GCP, among other public clouds. The aim is for companies to be able to use its Aqua Container Security Platform to secure and deploy applications, whether it be native Docker, Kubernetes or any other platform.
