Aqua Security CEO talks latest $60m funding round and what’s next

It’s all about the money. Aqua Security—a cloud native security company—raised $60 million in its latest funding round, an extension of its Series E.

Founded by Dror Davidoff and Amir Jerbi in 2015, Aqua currently provides security services to six of the top 10 banks in North America, and six of the top seven in Canada. It offers end-to-end protection for cloud-native applications, which CEO Davidoff says is just the beginning.

“When we started the journey, there wasn’t a space,” Davidoff told IT Brew. “We did something that was extremely new. And most people didn’t even understand what it is that we do and why it’s necessary. Eight years later, it’s a space, it’s a category.”

With 500 enterprise customers in 40 countries, Aqua has raised $325 million since its launch—the most recent round being led by Evolution Equity Partners. The company’s Series E round was also backed by M12—Microsoft’s venture fund, as well as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, and StepStone Group.

“We still have big, very aggressive growth plans,” Davidoff said. “So we needed to make sure we had the right funding and the right support to execute the plan.”

Payday. What are they going to do with the money? “We’re going to throw a crazy party,” Davidoff joked. The investments, he says, signal that the company is “heading in the right direction.” He Aqua has been expanding quickly, and plans to grow the team significantly in the coming year.

“We still have a very ambitious roadmap to the product,” he said. “We want to keep investing in the product. And some of this investment will just be organic evolution of hiring more people and developing more features and capabilities. But some of it is also looking for opportunities.”

Those opportunities, he said, could come in the form of acquiring technology or a company that would help Aqua “keep expanding what we offer our customers.”

On a mission. Davidoff said Aqua not only provides solutions for customers who want to protect their applications, but also monitors “new attacks, new behavior, so we can provide our customers with a better defense mechanism.”

“Because more and more companies are using the cloud, the cloud is now a prime target for the bad guys,” he said. “They realize, OK, if we can break in, we can really do some serious damage…So what we do is extremely important.”