It’s been a tumultuous ride for Lacework, the former Super Heavyweight of cloud security. The nine-year-old company started its meteoric rise almost immediately out of the gate, taking advantage of enterprise companies’ mass migrations to the cloud. The company closed its $8 million USD Series A almost immediately after emerging from stealth; five rounds and $1.9 billion of investment later, the company was backed by some impressive firms, including Snowflake, Google Ventures, Altimeter Capital, General Catalyst, and Sutter Hill Ventures. 

As of late 2021, Lacework was valued at $8.3 billion, yep, that’s “billion” with a “B,” making it — at least on paper —one of the biggest cybersecurity players on the market.

And then came the fall. While many companies — in and out of cybersecurity — floundered during and in the wake of the pandemic, cloud companies thrived. Businesses needed a way to get people working from home, quickly and securely, and the cloud security market capitalized on this momentum.

Lacework was one of the companies leading this effort. Bolstered by all the cash it could possibly need to advance and enhance its products, acquire companies/products to expand its portfolio and hire top talent, there should have been no stopping the company. They even jumped into the artificial intelligence (AI) fray before the term was splashed across every RSA vendor’s booth and sprinkled into sales and marketing collateral. The way Lacework was using AI (read: advanced math, a.k.a., algorithms) was by using anomaly-based detection in ever-shifting cloud environments. Great idea…but it fell short when it was realized that, uh oh! The training data didn’t exist. For any machine learning (ML) or AI algorithm to work, enormous amounts of data must be available for the model to learn. And it must be reliable and trustworthy data. But because of how cloud environments work — how busy they are, and the fact that many cloud-focused attacks are based on API calls (not the data in the cloud itself) — the technology started to falter. 

From the cloud to the ground

A whole lot of technological issues later, the company’s valuation started to drop. Lacework laid off 20% of its workforce. Key executives (like the co-CEO) started running for the hills. The remaining team management seemingly used questionable tactics to lure companies into buying the product. Employees—current and past—started complaining about the toxic and overly political culture. Customers started reporting the product’s lack of