Twistlock is pitching itself as the number-one option for enterprises looking to make their containers secure.

Iain Morris, International Editor

July 6, 2016

2 Min Read
Container Security Startup Twistlock Raises $10M

Startup Twistlock, which develops security solutions for virtual containers, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by TenEleven Ventures.

The funding comes about a year after Twistlock was founded with $3.1 million in seed funding and shows that interest in the company's technology is growing quickly.

Twistlock is pitching itself as the number-one option for securing container technologies, such as Docker, amid concern among enterprises about the security shortcomings of containers.

Containers allow companies to virtualize functions without having to deploy large virtual machines that each require their own operating system. They are often presented as a more sophisticated form of virtualization, giving companies greater flexibility.

Even so, some large businesses have been fretting about the security and performance implications of containers. In the telecom sector, for instance, the UK's BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) has said they could lead to an increase in complexity and trigger performance problems by exposing more interfaces externally. (See The Real NFV Revolution Is 5 Years Away.)

TenEleven founder Alex Doll -- who is to join Twistlock's board and already a director of cyber security companies including CounterTack and Cylance -- offered a glowing assessment of the company's technology in an official statement.

"As we have seen with every technology transition on the scale of today's cloud, the lack of trust can be the single biggest hurdle for adoption," said Doll. "The Twistlock team has accomplished an impressive rookie year record -- acquiring new customers, some of which are the world's largest enterprises, on a weekly basis."

For more NFV-related coverage and insights, check out our dedicated NFV content channel here on Light Reading.

Other companies participating in the Series A funding round include Rally Ventures, a new investor, and YL Ventures, which provided seed funding to Twistlock.

Twistlock CEO Ben Bernstein said the new funding would help the company to "aggressively" grow the business and technology.

Twistlock already claims to have signed up a number of Fortune 50 companies and large enterprises by embedding security at a very early stage of the container lifecycle.

"We aim to deliver completely automated security for the entire container stack without manual intervention and disruptive false alarms," said Dima Stopel, the head of R&D for Twistlock, in the company's statement. "This is what enterprises want and this is where Twistlock is headed."

— Iain Morris, Circle me on Google+ Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, News Editor, Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Iain Morris

International Editor, Light Reading

Iain Morris joined Light Reading as News Editor at the start of 2015 -- and we mean, right at the start. His friends and family were still singing Auld Lang Syne as Iain started sourcing New Year's Eve UK mobile network congestion statistics. Prior to boosting Light Reading's UK-based editorial team numbers (he is based in London, south of the river), Iain was a successful freelance writer and editor who had been covering the telecoms sector for the past 15 years. His work has appeared in publications including The Economist (classy!) and The Observer, besides a variety of trade and business journals. He was previously the lead telecoms analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, and before that worked as a features editor at Telecommunications magazine. Iain started out in telecoms as an editor at consulting and market-research company Analysys (now Analysys Mason).

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