Business Update: Aqua Security announces $135 million in series E funding at a $1 billion valuation

Aqua Security, the pure-play cloud native security leader, announced today the completion of $135 Million in Series E funding led by ION Crossover Partners, putting Aqua’s valuation in excess of $1 Billion. The round included broad participation from Aqua’s existing investors, including M12 – Microsoft’s venture fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates, and Acrew Capital. This new round of investment follows a period of tremendous growth and will enable the company to broaden and deepen its solution portfolio, as well as expand its presence geographically.

Aqua Security’s total funding since its founding in 2015 now totals $265 million. The company’s focus on cloud native security has enabled enterprises adopting technologies such as Kubernetes and containers, serverless, and other cloud-based workloads to accelerate their business while meeting strict compliance and security requirements. Aqua’s customer list includes some of the world’s leading organisations including 5 of the top 10 banks in the world.

The funding comes on the heels of a stellar year for Aqua in 2020, in which the company achieved multiple milestones:

• Aqua has doubled the number of paying customers with notable new customers in the federal, financial, energy, telecom, and automotive sectors.
• Aqua now has half a dozen customers with an ARR of over one million USD each.
• Aqua protects several of the world’s largest Kubernetes and container production environments, some with more than 10,000 nodes in a single environment.
• Aqua’s Team Nautilus published ground-breaking cyber research on the rise in sophisticated, organised attacks that target the container supply chain, which served to further develop the company’s unique Dynamic Threat Analysis solution, a container sandbox that identifies malware undetectable by static analysis tools.
• The adoption of Aqua’s open source tools more than doubled, with Trivy, Aqua’s open source vulnerability scanner, selected as the default scanner for the Harbor Registry, by GitLab, and for the CNCF’s Artifact Hub. 

“Aqua has demonstrated that they have the strongest products, and a compelling vision for how to best secure the modern technology stacks being deployed across the world’s largest enterprises” said Gili Iohan, General Partner at ION Crossover Partners. “In speaking with Aqua’s customers, it was clear that Aqua has the best platform for Kubernetes and cloud native security. Its ongoing innovative support for the wide range of multi-cloud environments, and superb customer success, have helped customers accelerate their move to cloud native platforms. We look forward to working with Aqua to further grow the business to drive global adoption and category dominance.”

“I am proud of what the Aqua team has accomplished in five short years,” said Dror Davidoff, CEO and co-founder of Aqua Security. “We delivered on our vision and have a clear direction forward to provide the best platform for cloud native security. We’ve shown that our research and development teams are ahead of the market with the launch of innovative products such as Aqua DTA, our new Kubernetes Security Posture Management, and the Aqua CSPM solution. As attacks targeting cloud native applications are now a fast-growing threat, we are here to empower our customers to protect their investment and secure their future in the cloud.”

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