Twistlock, a cloud-native security company, announced Wednesday that it has scored $33 million in a series C funding round.
The funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital and also included existing investors YL Ventures, TenEleven, Rally Ventures, Polaris Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. The latest round of funding for Portland, Oregon-based Twistlock increased its total to $63 million to date.
Twistlock has carved out a unique niche for itself in the cybersecurity world by developing solutions for cloud-native environments and container deployments. Twistlock CEO Ben Bernstein wrote in a company blog that when Twistlock was formed in 2015 the focus was on providing security for containerized applications.
"Fast-forward to today, and containers are just a small slice of the pie," Bernstein wrote. "As more and more organizations migrate to cloud-native, it’s just as likely for that journey to begin with serverless functions, DevOps usage of VMs (virtual machines), or CaaS platforms like AWS Fargate than with traditional containers."
"This rapidly evolving cloud-native continuum represents an opportunity to restructure how security is done—taking the best of DevOps and apply it to application security tools and practices in order to deliver stronger defense than ever before possible."
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While containers and serverless applications can be spun up or spun down on the fly, there's still a need to provide security across Dockerized containers and cloud-native environments. Cloud-native enables automation that simplifies deployments for service providers and enterprises, but it can also leave them vulnerable to security risks.
Twistlock protects applications across the development lifecycle and production of containers in cloud-native environments by automatically deploying runtime protection and firewalls. It also performs forensic analysis to troubleshoot how problems occurred.
Twistlock has grown its customer base by more than 350% each year since its founding and leads the industry with over 25% of Fortune 100 companies as its customers including Aetna, Walgreens and McKesson.
Earlier this month, Twistlock announced its 14th major release of its flagship platform, Twistlock 2.5. The latest release unified protection for containers, serverless functions and container-as-a-service platforms into a single, full-lifecycle, full stack security platform.