Celebrating Lightspin + Cisco

Today we celebrate Lightspin joining Cisco.

We believed early on that Vladi Sandler, Or Azarzar, and the Lightspin team has what it takes to both build highly differentiated cloud security solutions and to bring those solutions to market with a fresh perspective. In just three short years, they’ve done both in a big way.

From day one, Vladi and Or had a clear vision for Lightspin: Close the security and compliance gaps for companies increasingly reliant on cloud services. Securing cloud infra is a significant undertaking. In a world where cloud adoption is the default option for many players, coupled with the ‘shift left’ of engineering empowerment, there is outdated code, countless configurations, changing compliance policies, and complex access control challenges. This situation requires a deep tech approach that enables both the CISO and the engineering to provision, secure, and protect cloud infrastructure and workloads. Proving that this was a significant challenge/need, it was just a year into building the company and Lightspin had already earned a CRN Emerging Vendor in Security award.

But the real magic with this team is that they also understood that in the face of established competition, that they needed to get creative in the go to market realm as well. They ran dual track sales efforts to win over SaaS developers and make Lightspin the obvious buy for every CISO. They spun up a DevRel program and launched free tools to give deep visibility into how secure – or not – any cloud stack was for a potential customer. Their goal was to be so obviously valuable to all stakeholders that no Proof of Concept engagement would be needed to win new accounts.

Let’s be clear, even when they did end up in a bakeoff, the strength of their tech and appeal across stakeholders meant they regularly won business against much larger, more deeply funded companies.

The Lightspin story is yet another reminder that companies can find scale and success by sticking to the fundamental building-blocks of product-market-fit and go-to-market, while being “lean and mean.”

All of this success in such a short amount of time caught the eye of potential acquirers looking to strengthen their cloud security offerings. This team has worked tirelessly through some of the most challenging years to be a young company. We believe the resources and reach that comes with joining Cisco will provide the team and their technologies the platform to accomplish so much more.

Mazel tov!

— Yair Snir & the DTC team