CASE STUDY
Seed Investment
Background
RedLock was a public cloud security company focused on mitigating risks for enterprises on their journey to AWS, Azure and GCP. The space was rapidly evolving with a couple of well-funded startups which had been around for 3-4 years.
Founders:
The company was founded by Varun Badhwar and Gaurav Kumar in 2016. They were second-time entrepreneurs having previously worked at another security startup CipherCloud. The founders were a good combination of technical depth and customer focus.
Connection:
Sierra Ventures Managing Partner Mark Fernandes met the founders through an introduction from another security portfolio company executive. Given Sierra’s domain expertise, founders’ pedigree, and market opportunity, the timeline from first meeting to term sheet was less than 3 weeks.
Thesis:
Sierra Ventures has a strong track record in security with investments like Sourcefire (IPO, $2.7B M&A by Cisco), Frontbridge (acquired by Microsoft) and Nexgate (acquired by Proofpoint). We believe that “platform shifts” create opportunities and the move that public cloud offered was waiting to be exploited by the right entrepreneurs.
Investment:
Sierra Ventures led RedLock’s seed round of $3M in Q1:16. Within a year, the company raised an $11M Series A from Dell Capital at a significant premium given the strong progress. While in the process of closing a large Series B round from a top tier VC, RedLock was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $195M in October 2018.