Entrepreneur Lance Crosby is taking the coming out party for a stealth startup to a new extreme. His new startup, StackPath, publicly launched on Monday with attributes more typical of a veteran firm: 30,000 customers, three acquisitions already made and $150 million in investor funding.
Crosby sold his previous company, cloud infrastructure startup SoftLayer, to IBM in 2013 for $2 billion. SoftLayer quickly formed the core of IBM's growing cloud business unit, one that Big Blue continues to bet its corporate future behind. But Crosby has been long gone, after what he quips were "twenty months in the penitentiary" integrating SoftLayer into IBM.
Within weeks of leaving IBM, Crosby was diving deeply into an area that he'd found equal parts intriguing and troubling at SoftLayer: security. "We were leveraging legacy security products in a cloud-like way, but nothing was fully based on the cloud," he says. The problem was only greater at IBM, which worked with large customers, many of whom weren't prepared to use a widget built to exist online when their data was largely stored on-premise on their own servers.
"It was obvious that somebody had to fix this so that security could work on both sides of the fence, on-premise and in the cloud," Crosby says. So the entrepreneur spent weeks studying cloud security, attending the RSA conference in April 2015 and meeting with businesses he'd worked with in the past, many of which told him they didn't trust their own developers to build with security in mind. Researching hundreds of security firms, Crosby decided that the big one weren't adapting either, in his opinion. "They were dying even faster than IBM."
The result of that research is Crosby's new startup, StackPath, which bills itself as a "security-as-a-service" company. Intended as a flexible group of cloud-based services, StackPath is launching with five that promise to handle areas from secure content delivery to protection against DDoS attacks through APIs that customers can layer onto their systems. By collecting data from each use, StackPath plans to get smarter over time in its ability to monitor threats.
Unusually for a startup so young as StackPath, the company has already made four acquisitions to date. It's bought a content delivery network company, MaxCDN, a cloud firewall company in Israel called Fireblade, an anti-DDoS attack specialist called Staminus and a virtual private network company, Cloak. Adding their customer bases to the clients that Crosby and president Andrew Higginbotham brought with them from SoftLayer and CenturyLink, respectively, and the combined StackPath can claim 30,000 customers at its public launch.
It also has a large amount of money committed, taking a fast track to a later-stage style investment from the beginning similar to another big name cloud company, VMware and EMC spinout Pivotal. StackPath has already raised $150 million from private equity fund ABRY Partners, money that Crosby hopes will help the company grow quickly under a pace it can control, something he didn't experience at SoftLayer, which was used early on by Facebook, Tumbler, WhatsApp and Yelp and found itself raising prices in part to slow itself down, he says.
StackPath hopes to make companies trust their own developers better and allow developers to work without having to circumvent their own security systems, especially in the emerging markets of the Internet of Things and video streaming. If all goes well, Crosby hopes to limit the amount of resources that specialists and companies themselves have to spend on their own security. "Palo Alto Networks is great at seeing its part of the world, but they just see what passes over their switches and routers," he says. "And for big consumer apps like WhatsApp, the off the shelf stuff won't cut it, so they're building their own security."
