Aqua Security

Aqua Security was founded in 2015 by Dror Davidoff and Amir Jerbi. The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, with its core R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. It is privately held; the company raised a $135M Series E round in 2021 at a valuation of $1B, reaching unicorn status. Aqua Security builds a cloud-native security platform focused on securing containerized workloads, Kubernetes environments, and cloud infrastructure across the full software development lifecycle.

Aqua's primary focus is cloud-native application protection — specifically securing container images, Kubernetes clusters, serverless functions, and CI/CD pipelines. The buyers are DevSecOps teams, platform engineering teams, and security engineers at mid-to-large enterprises running workloads on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Aqua competes in the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) category, which has become one of the fastest-growing segments within enterprise cybersecurity as organizations migrate workloads to containers and Kubernetes at scale.

Aqua's flagship commercial product is the Aqua Platform, which covers vulnerability scanning of container images, runtime protection for running containers, Kubernetes security posture management, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning. Aqua also maintains Trivy, an open-source vulnerability scanner for containers and cloud-native assets; Trivy became one of the most widely adopted open-source security projects in the cloud-native ecosystem, hosted under the Aqua Security GitHub organization. The open-source Tracee project, also maintained by Aqua, is a runtime security and forensics tool built on Linux eBPF technology.

Aqua competes directly with Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud, Sysdig, Wiz, and CrowdStrike in the CNAPP and container security space. Wiz in particular emerged as a closely watched competitor during the early 2020s with an agentless approach that attracted rapid enterprise adoption. Aqua's differentiation has historically rested on deep runtime enforcement using agents rather than agentless scanning alone, and on its strong open-source presence through Trivy and Tracee, which drive significant developer community awareness.

Aqua's R&D is centered in Tel Aviv. Co-founder Amir Jerbi, who serves as CTO, is based in Israel. The Israeli operation houses the majority of the engineering and product teams. Aqua has been a consistent presence in the Israeli cloud-native security ecosystem and has recruited heavily from backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence and enterprise security engineering.