"You have to have a lot of proof points," Lacework CEO Dan Hubbard told Insider, after his Silicon Valley startup raked in a half-billion-dollar round after previously raising a total of $74.4 million.
The six-year-old Silicon Valley company addresses the booming area of providing cybersecurity to companies growing and moving their operations to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Perhaps the most important proof point is the total addressable market (TAM) that Lacework is tackling – a figure that gauges revenue opportunity – is climbing 20% year over year and reaching $13 billion in 2024. Analysts back that up.
Analyst Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wall Street analyst firm Wedbush Securities, told Insider on Friday that "there's $200 billion up for grabs in the next five years in cloud security."
"We have the right product in the right market at the right time," Hubbard told Insider last week. "The problem has come to us."
The company says it has seen revenue triple each of the past two years as more businesses build and run applications on the major cloud platforms. The company did not disclose revenue or specific valuation, but says the latter is above $1 billion.
PitchBook shows the funding round was the largest in the cybersecurity industry for the past year, and the 22nd largest in all US industries over that span.
It could have been even larger, Hubbard said. "There was an incredible amount of interest. There are going to be some people who feel left out."
Mike Speiser, managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, compared the startup to his firm's runaway success investment Snowflake, which has rocketed to a market cap of some $76 billion after its September IPO.
Here's the pitch deck Lacework used to land the mammoth funding round. Some slides with customer and competitive data have been removed by the company to protect proprietary information.