Why Nothing Can Contain Twistlock’s Explosive Growth

Earlier today, container security pioneer and YL Ventures portfolio company, Twistlock announced an impressive $33 million Series C financing round led by influential Silicon Valley investor ICONiQ Capital. This brings their total funding to $63 million. A remarkable achievement, and the latest of many milestones marking Twistlock’s astounding progress and pace. In three whirlwind years, co-founders Ben Bernstein and Dima Stopel have built a stellar global team, muscular market presence, and category-defining cloud-native cybersecurity platform. Each compounding advantage only accelerates Twistlock toward its goals with singular purpose.

The focus and conviction driving this growth has been integral to Twistlock since day one. And I was fortunate enough to experience this dynamism first-hand when YL Ventures led Twistlock’s seed round back in May of 2015. After my partner Ofer Schreiber and I first met Ben and Dima, we immediately appreciated the scope of their vision. But ultimately, it was their attitude that convinced us they could execute. Both shared a quiet charisma that blended introspective intelligence with confident vision. This outlook propelled Twistlock’s meteoric rise, and continues to fuel its success in many ways. Plotting a few key inflection points will help chart Twistlock’s dramatic current trajectory and extrapolate its continued climb.

Predicting Massive Opportunity

In early 2015, Ben and Dima approached us with the pitch that would eventually become Twistlock. While flipping through a few humble slides, they accurately predicted massive enterprise adoption of virtual containers, then brilliantly anticipated the coming market demand to secure those containers. We realized the opportunity they identified was strong, but also understood the window for timing was tight. YL Ventures agreed to invest, but advised Ben and Dima to move to launch (and Ben to relocate to the U.S. for effective go-to-market) immediately. Just one week later, they had revamped their materials, messaging and website; and even settled on an excellent new name. With that, Twistlock was formally introduced to the world, and has remained number one in the cloud native and container security space ever since.

Perfecting Product-Market Fit

From Twistlock’s earliest days, they’ve maintained their edge by consistently and effectively anticipating the market, simplifying implementation and prioritizing the preferences of developers and DevOps teams. This vision has informed every product since Twistlock 1.0. Development of that first major release was completed just months after emerging from stealth. Ben and Dima made their first two of many crucial senior hires, recruiting the brilliant Liron Levin (Chief Architect) and John Morello (CTO). This core leadership team worked diligently with 15 prominent beta partners to validate features and roadmap deployment. Careful incorporation of customer feedback honed the final product until it fit the market perfectly. And in June 2015, Twistlock’s revolutionary Container Security Platform launched with explosive impact. The industry quickly realized this product turned a security gap into a point of strength. Twistlock’s customer base grew 350% that year–and the company kept its hyper-growth every year since. In our 11-year history we have never seen growth metrics this impressive.

Building a Go-to-Market Machine

Ben and Dima managed and sustained this runaway success by wisely reinvesting in world-class leadership and guidance. Through sheer force of will, they assembled an unrivaled management team to join them at the helm. Cybersecurity veteran Brendan Hannigan (Chairman) has become an invaluable mentor since leading Twistlock’s Series B round as an Entrepreneur Partner at Polaris Partners. In addition, Brian Lake (CRO), Josh Thorngren (VP Marketing) and John Leon (VP Business Development & Strategic Alliances) have engineered a masterful go-to-market machine that continues to devour market share and has helped Twistlock secure 25% of the Fortune 100 as customers and/or partners. Headcount can barely keep pace, increasing 200% per year spread over five global offices. At the same time, Twistlock proactively raises the market’s ceiling for growth through its industry-leading research and development. Collaborations with NIST, CIS, Docker and countless others simultaneously enrich and expand the existing cloud native landscape. There’s no containing this kind of growth, which is carefully overseen by Twistlock’s outstanding VP Finance, Pini Karuchi.

Today’s announcement marks a massive achievement worth celebrating. Ben, Dima and the entire Twistlock family have so many accomplishments to look back on and even more to look forward to. YL Ventures has been behind Twistlock from the start and we remain committed as ever. We are incredibly proud and fortunate to have been a meaningful part of their journey since day one. We’ve come a long, long way together so far, but I sincerely believe the best is yet to come.

Ben and Dima in 2015 eating home-made cholent at their desks to save $10 on lunch. At the time they said they hoped that one day they’ll look back at this picture and find that they have come a long way. And surely they did…

Brian and Ben at the DockerCon 2018 conference in San Francisco.

Twistlock’s beautiful offices in Portland, Oregon. One of the conference rooms was named ‘Yoav’, after me!

Twistlock’s state-of-the-art R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel.