Sales hiring and upmarket drove Lacework
Lacework
Lacework’s early surge came from buying distribution fast, then making each win worth more. The company sharply expanded sales capacity as cloud security budgets were opening up, and it was also selling into larger enterprises where one contract could cover far more cloud accounts, workloads, and teams. That combination lifts revenue twice, first through more reps creating more pipeline, then through bigger contracts once the product proves itself inside larger organizations.
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Headcount growth was unusually aggressive even by 2021 security standards. Lacework went from roughly 250 employees at the end of 2020 to about 700 by November 2021, and the company described employee growth as more than 3x year over year. That is the classic setup for a founder led motion turning into a scaled enterprise sales machine.
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The upmarket move mattered because cloud security contracts expand with the size and complexity of the customer’s cloud estate. A larger enterprise has more AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts, more workloads to scan, more compliance needs, and more security buyers involved, so average deal size can rise from $100,000 to $150,000 without needing radically more customers.
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This was also the period when cloud security winners were separating into enterprise platforms and point tools. Wiz showed the same pattern at a larger scale, reaching about $495,000 ACV with roughly 800 customers, while Orca and Lacework competed as broader cloud security platforms rather than narrow tools. Bigger customers tended to prefer vendors that could cover more of the cloud stack in one purchase.
The next phase in this market favors vendors that can keep pushing ACV higher while bundling more cloud security functions into one contract. That makes enterprise sales execution and product breadth more important than raw logo growth, and it pushes cloud security toward consolidation around a smaller number of platform vendors.