Chainguard, a start-up focused on secure open-source components, raised $356 million in a Series D round. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP, with Salesforce Ventures and Datadog Ventures also participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $612 million, valuing Chainguard at $3.5 billion. CEO Dan Lorenc highlighted that Chainguard’s revenue grew significantly, from $5 million to $40 million, and the company now serves over 100 paying enterprise customers.
Founded by ex-Google engineers, Chainguard initially offered pre-secured Linux container images for Kubernetes environments.
The company’s product catalog grew rapidly from 400 to 1,400 container images within the past year. Chainguard’s success is attributed to its “software factory,” an automated system that patches and signs over 13,000 upstream open-source packages. This factory now supports Chainguard VMs and Chainguard Libraries, both aimed at securing open-source solutions for enterprise customers.
The company counts major organizations such as ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Snap Inc. among its customers. Chainguard’s offerings are designed to secure the open-source software supply chain, which is becoming increasingly crucial due to a rise in security incidents. Chainguard’s growing catalog and security solutions are designed to reduce the amount of daily maintenance required for enterprises using open-source components.
Chainguard plans to use the funding to expand its team in engineering and sales, aiming to secure more open-source projects. With the increase in supply chain security incidents, Chainguard’s offerings are seen as a critical tool for compliance teams. The company aims to be the “safe source” for open-source by continuously securing and hardening software at all levels of the stack.
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