A Chat with Dror Davidoff, Co-Founder and CEO at Cybersecurity Company: Aqua Security

Aqua Security’s mission is to make the cloud a safer place. Founded in 2015, Aqua is the pioneer of the container security market, and today is the largest pure-play cloud native security company and the market leader.

Aqua enables customers to capture the benefits of cloud-native development, without sacrificing the security of their supply chains and production environments. More than 400 enterprises around the world use the Aqua Platform, including more than 20% of the Fortune 500 and 5 of the world’s 10 largest banks. Aqua also has strategic partnerships with AWS, Azure, GCP, Rad Hat and VMware.

In March 2021, Aqua completed a $135 Million in Series E funding that places the company’s valuation in excess of $1 Billion.
 
 
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How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Six years ago, when I was looking for a new venture and the next “big thing,” I met my co-founder Amir Jerbi, and it was love at first sight. We shared a similar vision and acknowledged a big market opportunity: the transition to cloud native technologies was in its infancy, and it was opening the door for security problems in its wake.

Companies were moving to the cloud for not just shared computing and storage but to modernize their application infrastructure. Just as the technology stack was about to change, so would the security stack. There was an opportunity to do security differently, more granularly and add it into the development cycle.

Traditional on-prem security vendors didn’t have the technology in place to protect cloud native environments. The public cloud providers weren’t prepared to provide their own security. There was an enormous market emerging and a need for a new approach to security – one to enable organisations to move to cloud native safely. Thus, Aqua Security was born.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
In a pre-pandemic world, Aqua had a very face-to-face, in-office culture with some exceptions including developer, regional sales and customer success roles. The pandemic forced us, like most other companies, to re-evaluate remote work and embrace it.

We have learned that we can operate very successfully in a distributed manner around the world across all functions, and the side benefit is that we opened up the talent pool to allow us to hire wherever the expertise is, not just where we have an office.

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation globally, and we benefited from the pace of adoption. The business and the wider market are at critical inflection points, and we are growing rapidly in every measurable dimension to support customer demand. With several new key hires in leadership, open-source and R&D, as well as a Series E funding round, we’ve set the foundation for our next wave of growth.
 

What can we hope to see from Aqua Security in the future?

 
The bad guys have shifted their focus to the cloud, and it is undoubtedly the newest battleground. But as the cloud becomes the next frontier for cyber threats, Aqua will be there to protect organisations and enterprises across the world.

At Aqua, we believe every person and organisation has a right to run applications freely and securely in the cloud – regardless of size, scale or geography. The future of work and business depends on cloud-native, and we have a lot of exciting developments on the horizon.

We’re continuing to invest in cyber research. Our research team, Nautilus, is on the front lines investigating and finding ways to mitigate attacks. Nautilus’ findings educate the market on cloud native threats, drive Aqua product innovation, and inform enforcement policies.

Additionally, we believe that open source democratizes security and accelerates DevSecOps processes, and we’re continuing to invest in open source projects, such as Trivy, the world’s most popular vulnerability scanner, and contributing to a vibrant open source community.

Aqua is the pioneer in cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP). To continue to lead the industry, we will introduce exciting product developments in the coming months. More threat and vulnerability detection of course, but also policies and actionable responses. Visibility isn’t enough – our customers require a platform that takes action to stop threats and mitigates vulnerabilities from dev through runtime. Of course, this also means we will accelerate hiring to ensure we have the best talent from across the globe.