Cybersecurity startup Chainguard is officially a unicorn after raising $140 million in Series C funding. The additional venture capital investment now triples the company’s valuation to $1.12 billion. Chainguard specializes in securing container images, open source software, and software supply chain security.
The company’s blog announcement states that Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and IVP led the Series C investment round.
Existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, and Mantis VC, participated in this funding round.
Total investment in Chainguard across all private equity and venture capital is now $256 million.
New investment to help customers secure AI workloads
Chainguard states the new funding will help expand go-to-market initiatives across multiple markets and product capabilities. Chainguard is prioritizing international market growth and investing in its Federal business to support customers with challenging compliance requirements for software security.
Part of the investment in expanding product capabilities will include Chainguard AI Images, a growing suite of CPU and GPU-enabled container images, including Pytorch, Conda, and Kafka, that are hardened, minimal, and optimized for efficient software development. The solution also offers optimized GPU-enabled images, like PyTorch, with dependencies, including drivers and libraries, to secure the deployment and management of GPU-accelerated AI applications with low-to-zero vulnerabilities and hardened configurations.
“Software supply chain security was dead on arrival”
Dan Lorenc, Chainguard Founder and Chief Executive Officer, announced the Series C investment round and commented on the flawed market for software supply chain security on LinkedIn.
Lorenc states that the cybersecurity market is “crowded, noisy, and loud” and that Biden Administration regulations enacted after the 2020 SolarWinds breach further inflated the market.
“Software supply chain security was dead on arrival,” Lorenc states, with software bill of materials (SBOMs), which list individual software components, as a failed initiative with unrealistic expectations. Cyber startups marketing SBOM capabilities further “check the box” compliance offerings “waiting on government mandates to require enterprises to buy their solutions.”
Safe Source For Open Source
Lorenc believes the market has merits, though. It requires a different approach, which he calls “Safe Source For Open Source.”
He continues, “Our Chainguard Images platform provides a safe, trusted way to build software on top of containers through a fully-managed open source supply chain. This isn’t a new tool or a scanner, we’re providing a secure software supply chain, starting at the root — open source.”
Chainguard helps cybersecurity professionals, developers, and organizations design secure software by default on Chainguard Academy.
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