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Congratulating Aqua on their unicorn status

Aqua team members

I’m thrilled to congratulate Aqua — the complete cloud native security platform — on their latest funding round and unicorn status. M12’s initial investment in Aqua as lead of their series A round was announced in September 2016, just months after our fund was founded. While their product offering has evolved and expanded greatly since then, Aqua started as a container security platform.

We acknowledged at the time that containers were a significant and escalating trend, revolutionizing the way that organizations were working. We assessed that security would be one of the biggest challenges of deploying containers in production, when compared with virtual machines. Aqua’s comprehensive offering indeed enabled enterprises to accelerate the adoption of containers on both private and public clouds.

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

Since 2016, Aqua has been working closely with Microsoft product teams to capitalize on co-marketing opportunities.

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.

Aqua has also landed several groups at Microsoft as customers, further validating their solution in the market.

With this latest round of funding the company will be able to move even faster and capitalize on growing cloud adoption.

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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