After closing a record financing round ($525 million) in the cybersecurity space early this year, cloud-security unicorn Lacework remains focused on investing in research and development (R&D) and recruiting new talent including former Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikh as co-CEO. Lacework's other co-CEO David Hatfield told SDxCentral that he expects the company's headcount will reach 1,000 employees by the end of this year.

“This is one of the fastest growing software-as-a-service companies in history,” Hatfield said. In order to keep growing, “you need to make the investments to continue to scale and support your customers and support the quality of people that you have,” he added.

Hatfield explained that the funding helped accelerate Lacework's investment in R&D, future innovations, awareness building, recruiting and onboarding programs, as well as expanding the company's global footprint. 

Lacework has quadrupled its R&D team over the past 12 months. “A lot of what we're doing is bringing on world-class engineers, and then onboarding them, and getting them focused on delivering innovation going forward,” he said.

Overall, Hatfield noted the company has three and a half times more employees than it did a year ago, which is in line with its revenue growth. He anticipates a continued acceleration of growth next year.

The vendor brings in more than 100 new customers every quarter, Hatfield added. As the company continues to scale, it increases investments outside of North America. In fact, Lacework has been investing in its expansion into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) for the past couple of quarters. It now serves around 22 countries and has more than 100 employees in the region, according to Hatfield.

Outside of EMEA, Lacework built up a team in Australia and New Zealand, and then plans to expand into broader Asia over time.

Hatfield brought in a partner in July: co-CEO Jay Parikh. They worked together at Akamai Technologies around 20 years ago where Hatfield served as director of U.S. direct sales, and Parikh was VP of engineering. Parikh later joined Facebook in 2009 and helped it expand to 35,000 engineers.

Hatfield believes their different backgrounds help them to make better and faster decisions for their company: He sits on the business strategy and go-to-market side while Parikh is more on the engineering and technology side.

The co-CEO model is no stranger to either of them. Parikh's been on Atlassian's board for eight years, and it had a co-CEO model. Hatfield worked at Pure Storage as vice chair, and one of its then-board members Aneel Bhusri serves as a co-CEO for software company Workday.

Hatfield said it is “fun and productive for both of us to be together.”

Lacework developed a cloud security platform that provides several capabilities including cloud security posture management, vulnerability scanning, cloud-workload protection, threat detection and response, runtime and build-time threat defense, and identity and access management across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes- and container-based environments.

“We wanted to create a system that actually gave you really high fidelity alerts where something really needed to be investigated that fit in a completely automated way into your development workflows,” Hatfield explained.

He added that they compete with the legacy cloud-security providers who are trying to manage their legacy infrastructure and business models, while Lacework provides a software-based, data-driven platform that helps consolidate security tools while delivering a more efficient and automated user experience with their agile SaaS model. 

He referred to Palo Alto Networks as an example. The vendor acquired more than a dozen companies to create its Prisma Cloud platform, so its leaders have to spend a lot of time and energy to stitch those assets together, and Hatfield believes it’s difficult to create a great customer experience in this situation.

“We compete with all of the large security players every day and win north of 90% of the time when we go head to head with them,” Hatfield said. “Our challenge is competing with their distribution and their brand because we're the new people, new player coming up. People don't know who Lacework is yet.”