Congratulating Aqua on their unicorn status

We invested early in Aqua — right at their product launch — so a primary consideration in our diligence was about company leadership.

From the beginning, we were incredibly impressed by the vision of co-founders Dror Davidoff and Amir Jerbi — both IT security industry veterans. They had the right balance of sales and technology expertise to build a truly disruptive startup.

Post-investment, we promptly explored opportunities to leverage Microsoft’s platform to support Aqua’s growth. Since 2016, Aqua has been working closely with Microsoft product teams to capitalize on co-marketing opportunities — including featured placements in Azure Marketplace, which helped them land Fortune 500 companies early on. M12 facilitated connections with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) leadership when Aqua saw product integration as a potential customer acquisition channel. Aqua quickly prioritized integrations, and has been collaborating with the AKS engineering team ever since to ensure that support for those integrations persists. Over the years, Aqua has become a primary security partner of AKS, featured in documentation and tech blogs. Aqua has also landed several groups at Microsoft as customers, further validating their solution in the market.

Over the years, Aqua has maintained significant momentum, attracting hundreds of enterprise customers across several sectors — including finance, media, healthcare, retail, and of course technology. Microsoft’s co-sell program — the opportunity to sell jointly alongside Microsoft’s global sales team — is another way that Aqua has leveraged M12’s value platform to realize growth. With nearly 50 deals, millions in revenue won, and more in the pipeline, Aqua is expanding their co-sell efforts outside of the US via technical workshops with Microsoft sellers in the UK, Germany, and APAC.

Aqua’s track record to date has shown steady growth and anticipation of market trends, allowing it to remain at the forefront of the evolving cloud native space. With this latest round of funding the company will be able to move even faster and capitalize on growing cloud adoption.

Congratulations to Dror, Amir, and the team on this recent fundraise and your incredible achievement of unicorn status.

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