We are thrilled to announce our investment in Threat Stack, the cyber security company detecting threats in the cloud. We participated in the $45m round alongside our F-Prime Capital  colleagues in the US (hat-tip to Gaurav Tuli our long-time colleague who we are excited to work with again) as well as leading investors: .406 , Accomplice and Scale Partners.

Threat Stack is headquartered in Boston and the CEO Brian Ahern is one of the top cyber executives we’ve met. Brian has set his sights on solving the global problem of security in the cloud and we look forward to helping him branch outside the US fast.

The public cloud adoption is still early, although increasing fast. The market leader AWS is growing at 40+%, and Microsoft is close to doubling. But larger enterprises are still hesitant about using public cloud in production environments, despite clear benefits including scalability, variability of costs, and continued refresh of underlying infrastructure and tools.

The primary reason for delayed adoption are concerns about security, which is cited as the number one bottleneck, with 88% of executives (in the Baker & McKenzie 2015/16 Cloud Survey) quoting it as the main reason for hesitation. At the same time, the traditional security approaches from the on-premise environments do not work in the hyper-scalable cloud environment. This is where Threat Stack comes in – it provides a comprehensive cross-cloud platform to audit, monitor and investigate cloud workloads continuously. 

In addition to the compelling need, which Threat Stack is solving, the product they have built works for cloud-native and enterprise companies alike. It already has many high-profile companies using it as their sole security tool and its subscription model means customers can start small and expand their usage as their need for visibility and control with their cloud infrastructure grows. It also takes a comprehensive approach to detection, combining security monitoring and risk assessment – protecting companies from intrusion, insider threats and data loss.

CEO, Brian Ahern, talks about how Threat Stack works with its customers, saying: “We’ve been able to help all sizes of companies - from small, rapidly scaling start-ups to massive corporations with complex legacy infrastructure. Every company is looking to get their arms around the security of their infrastructure. Most are dealing with a shortage of security talent and increasingly automated development processes - so there is a unique need for deploying security at speed and scale. Threat Stack has built a platform for both security and operations teams to do just that.”

The other important element of the Threat Stack proposition is a great team under the leadership of Brian Ahern, who bootstrapped his last cyber security company Industrial Defender, and sold it to Lockheed Martin for $189m with no institutional capital raised. We have a huge respect for entrepreneurs who build formidable companies with limited resources and Brian is certainly one of them. He has also built a great culture at Threat Stack and has attracted a top team which includes Sam Bisbee as CTO, a former F-Prime executive in a successful company Cloudant.

We are thrilled and thankful for the opportunity to be a part of the Threat Stack story and look forward to help building the leading global cloud cybersecurity company.