Container and cloud security unicorn Sysdig today scored $350 million in a Series G funding round led by Permira. The cash infusion brings the total raised to $744 million and pushes the vendor's valuation to $2.5 billion.

“We took funding now because the cloud security market has taken off and this is the time to expand capacity in every aspect of our business, and we didn’t want capital to be a prohibitor,” Sysdig CEO Suresh Vasudevan told SDxCentral in an email.

Sysdig offers security and performance monitoring services tailored toward cloud-native applications. Today's funding round will enable the company to accelerate the expansion of these services into new markets, increase its headcount and customer base, and invest in research and development, Vasudevan said.

Sysdig’s customer base has grown 140% year over year to nearly 700 customers, and its average annual recurring revenue now tops more than $875,000 across its 50 largest customers, the vendor claims.

The company has also doubled its headcount over the past year and “plans to do it again with an eye on accelerating growth in Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, and South America,” Vasudevan wrote. 

Sysdig expanded its software-as-a-service (SaaS) hosting locations from nine to 16 over the same period and expects to bring more locations online in the near future. 

On top of the go-to-market build out, Sysdig also plans to deepen its partnerships with the major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud.

Sysdig acquired Apolicy in August, which enabled the vendor to shift security further left by integrating Apolicy’s infrastructure as code (IaC) technology into its platform to better secure DevOps workflows. Not long after, the company launched guided remediation for IaC manifests and an out-of-the-box integration with GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and BitBucket.

Sysdig plans to make the ability to enforce compliance and governance via policy as code and its guided remediation functionality available early next year, Vasudevan said.

Sysdig also added cloud configuration risk management and cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) earlier this year. “Looking ahead, we will be extending these capabilities to all of the major cloud providers,” Vasudevan said. 

Founded in 2013, Sysdig started with two open source projects as its foundation: the threat detection engine for container and cloud called Falco and its own platform for incident responses using deep data and context. 

The projects thrived, as Falco downloads increased to 37 million, up 335% since it became an incubating project in the cloud-native computing foundation (CNCF) in early 2020, Sysdig claims.

Those open source projects helped Sysdig drive the standards for cloud security, Vasudevan said. “Together, Sysdig and Falco have become industry standards for modern runtime security spanning threat and anomaly detection and incident response in containers and cloud,” he wrote in a blog post.

Despite enjoying rapid growth and another strong funding round, Sysdig doesn't plan to go public anytime soon, Vasudevan said. “Our belief is that going public in the short-term would take away from our focus on scaling and building the next great security company,” he added.