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Lacework announced a $42 million financing round on September 17, 2019, naming Sutter Hill Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures as the investors and appointing Andy Byron as president. The company said the capital would fund product innovation and go-to-market expansion in cloud, container, DevOps and hybrid-environment security.
This is a historical announcement, not a current independent Lacework fundraising event. Fortinet agreed to acquire Lacework in June 2024 and completed the transaction effective August 1, 2024.
What Lacework announced on September 17, 2019
The financing, executive appointment and board changes were presented together as a growth plan for Lacework, then a cloud-security startup.
| Announcement | What was disclosed |
|---|---|
| Financing | $42 million from Sutter Hill Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures |
| Executive appointment | Andy Byron became president, with responsibility for sales, marketing and customer acquisition |
| Board appointments | Mike Speiser and John McMahon joined the board |
The available announcement does not identify the financing as a Series A, Series B, debt facility or another formal round type. It also does not disclose investor-by-investor contributions, valuation, dilution, prior capital raised or a detailed spending budget. Dark Reading’s account of the announcement is the basis for these 2019 details.
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Why the money mattered to Lacework’s strategy
Lacework said the funding would support two connected priorities:
- Product innovation: continued development of its cloud-security technology.
- Go-to-market expansion: broader sales, marketing, education and outreach to security, compliance and DevOps teams.
The announcement placed those priorities in the context of infrastructure that was becoming more dynamic: public-cloud services, containerized applications, orchestration systems and DevOps-driven deployment. Lacework positioned its platform as a way to maintain visibility and detect suspicious activity across changing cloud and hybrid environments rather than relying only on controls designed for static data centers.
The source does not establish a hiring target, runway, revenue milestone, valuation or return on the investment. The financing demonstrates investor backing, but it does not by itself prove product-market fit, customer retention or market leadership.
Andy Byron’s role as president
Byron was appointed to lead Lacework’s sales and marketing functions, acquire new customers and help establish the company as a cloud and container security leader. According to Lacework’s announcement, he had previously served as chief revenue officer at Cybereason and as president and chief operating officer at Fuze.
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Putting a president with a go-to-market remit alongside new financing suggested that Lacework was moving from an early product-and-technology phase toward more aggressive enterprise expansion. That is a strategic reading of the responsibilities announced in 2019, not evidence that the plan later succeeded.
Who joined the board
Mike Speiser
Speiser joined as a partner at Sutter Hill Ventures. The announcement described him as a former founding CEO of Snowflake and associated his experience with rapidly scaling technology companies.
John McMahon
McMahon also joined the board. The announcement described him as a cloud-industry veteran and a Snowflake board member at the time, with experience connected to companies including Pure Storage and MongoDB.
Investor descriptions comparing Lacework with “Snowflake for security” should be treated as an investor’s characterization, not an independent market assessment.
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What Lacework said its platform covered
In 2019, Lacework described a broad cloud-security platform covering:
- Cloud and hybrid workloads
- Containers and orchestration environments
- DevOps environments
- Visibility and intrusion detection
- Security and compliance use cases
The company emphasized adapting to changing configurations and identifying abnormal behavior. The announcement does not provide independent detection tests, false-positive rates, deployment times, pricing or comparative performance data. Later industry terminology such as CNAPP should not be read back into the 2019 announcement as though Lacework used that label at the time.
Customers named in the announcement
Lacework identified HashiCorp, Iterable and AdRoll as newer customers. No contract values, deployment sizes, renewal rates or module-level usage were disclosed, so those references cannot be used to quantify commercial traction.
What was—and was not—disclosed
| Question | Answer based on the available announcement |
|---|---|
| Was this a named Series round? | Not stated |
| What was the valuation? | Not disclosed |
| How much did each investor contribute? | Not disclosed |
| Was the financing debt or equity? | Not stated |
| How would the $42 million be allocated? | Only broad product and go-to-market purposes were given |
| Were performance benchmarks published? | No independent benchmarks were included |
Why the 2019 appointment was strategically significant
Cloud security vendors often face a tension between broad platform coverage and execution complexity. A platform spanning cloud accounts, containers, DevOps, runtime behavior and compliance can reduce tool sprawl, but it can also make deployment, product messaging and alert investigation harder. Likewise, behavioral analysis may reduce reliance on static rules while making explainability and tuning especially important. The 2019 announcement offered no measurements that resolve either trade-off.
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What happened to Lacework after the announcement
Fortinet announced an agreement to acquire Lacework on June 10, 2024. Fortinet said it intended to integrate Lacework’s cloud-native application protection capabilities into the Fortinet Security Fabric. The transaction closed effective August 1, 2024; the cited acquisition announcement did not disclose financial terms.
Fortinet later described plans to offer the acquired CNAPP solution both separately and integrated with its existing portfolio in an SEC filing. Lacework’s documentation is now hosted on Fortinet’s documentation site at docs.lacework.net. Accordingly, Lacework should be described in 2026 as a Fortinet-owned product lineage, not as an independently operating startup.
How to interpret the announcement today
- It was a 2019 growth and go-to-market milestone, not a current $42 million fundraise.
- Andy Byron was named president, not CEO, and the announcement does not establish that he remains in that role.
- The investors were named, but the round structure and financial mechanics were not.
- The customer and product claims came from company announcement material and were not accompanied by independent testing.
- Fortinet’s 2024 acquisition changed the company’s ownership and is essential context for any current reference to Lacework.
Current buyer context
Readers evaluating Lacework-related capabilities today should start with Fortinet’s current cloud-security offering and confirm which Lacework technologies, names, support commitments and packaging remain available. Fortinet’s official cloud-security page is fortinet.com/products/cloud-security.
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A comparison should also consider independent and cloud-native alternatives:
| Product | General positioning | Official page |
|---|---|---|
| Wiz | Broad cloud visibility, exposure analysis and attack-path prioritization | wiz.io |
| Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud | Broad CNAPP and cloud-security portfolio | paloaltonetworks.com/prisma/cloud |
| Orca Security | Agentless cloud-security and exposure prioritization | orca.security |
| Microsoft Defender for Cloud | Native choice for organizations invested in Azure and Microsoft security | microsoft.com/security/business/cloud-security/microsoft-defender-cloud |
| AWS Security Hub | AWS-native findings aggregation and posture management | aws.amazon.com/security-hub |
| Google Security Command Center | Google Cloud-native security and risk management | cloud.google.com/security-command-center |
For any evaluation, verify cloud and Kubernetes coverage, agentless versus agent-based collection, runtime protection, identity context, code-to-cloud controls, remediation workflows, compliance evidence, data residency, integrations and the pricing metric. Public pricing was not verified for these enterprise products in the cited material; quotes may depend on assets, workloads, data volume, modules or annual commitments.
The Bottom Line
Bottom line: Lacework’s September 2019 announcement combined $42 million from Sutter Hill Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures with Andy Byron’s appointment as president and two board additions. It marked an effort to scale cloud-security products and enterprise go-to-market execution. Since Fortinet completed its acquisition of Lacework on August 1, 2024, the announcement should now be read as company history and product lineage—not as evidence of a current independent Lacework startup.
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