Lacework, a Silicon Valley start-up offering cloud security solutions, named David “Hat” Hatfield as its new Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, replacing former CEO Dan Hubbard who now takes the helm as Lacework’s Chief Product Officer. Lacework founder and CTO, Vikram Kapoor is taking on an additional role as the founder of a wholly owned Lacework entity, to be revealed at a later date.
Hatfield most recently has served as president and vice-chairman of Pure Storage. Prior to that he played key leadership roles at Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks, from the early stages through IPOs, and participated in one of the largest software mergers in history at the time, of Veritas Software and Symantec Corporation.
“Lacework is building the security company for the public cloud and we believe Hat is the right leader to fully realize its potential,” said Mike Speiser, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures and Lacework board member. “We believe Lacework is on a trajectory to do for cloud security what Snowflake is doing for cloud data warehousing. We are thrilled to have Hat take the helm as we aggressively expand product development and scale globally. We also wish to recognize the important contributions Dan Hubbard has made over the past four years and we’re excited he will be leading the innovation strategy to deliver the most comprehensive and loved cloud security platform in the market.”
“Lacework is a special company with a fantastic team and an enormous opportunity,” said David Hatfield, newly appointed Lacework CEO. “With tens of thousands of companies and hundreds of billions of dollars shifting away from data centers to the cloud, the attack surface area and software development processes have fundamentally changed, and the legacy approaches for security simply don’t work. Lacework was purpose built to secure digital businesses built on dynamic cloud infrastructure. Digital businesses should not have to choose between innovation speed and security. With our leading innovation and customer obsession, Lacework is poised to become the leading security platform of the cloud era.”
Lacework also announced that renowned security and machine learning researcher Ulfar Erlingsson, PhD. has joined the company as Chief Architect. Erlingsson holds over 30 issued U.S. patents and has authored dozens of influential scientific publications with wide-ranging impact on computer architecture, operating systems, data-parallel processing, as well as computer security and privacy mechanisms. He is currently chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy, and joins Lacework from Apple, where he led the development of privacy-preserving technologies for machine learning. Prior to that he held similar positions at Google Brain, led research in cloud security in Google’s infrastructure security team, as well as at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley. Early on, his startup GreenBorder Technologies provided the security foundations of the Chrome web browser.
https://www.lacework.com/
- In January 2021, Lacework, the security platform for the cloud generation, today announced a $525 million growth round with a valuation of $1 billion. Led by Sutter Hill and Altimeter Capital, and joined by D1 Capital Partners, Coatue, Dragoneer Investment Group, Liberty Global Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Tiger Global Management, the round reflects Lacework’s accelerated adoption among digital businesses building on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Kubernetes.
