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Our $26.5M Round — Growth Built on Sea Change of Kubernetes and DevSecOps

Today we’re excited to announce our $26.5M round of funding led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Highland Capital Partners and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise along with existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The influx of capital will enable us to meet rapidly growing demand driven by two of the biggest trends in IT and Security — Kubernetes and DevSecOps — and deliver on our vision to enable organizations to securely build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications anywhere.

According to a recent CNCF survey, 78% of respondents are running Kubernetes in production, up from 58% the year previous. More than 3,000 companies and 35,000 individuals have made nearly 100,000 contributions to the code in the six years since Kubernetes was open sourced. And DevSecOps has moved from buzzword to business strategy, with 68% of organizations planning to use DevSecOps practices to secure a majority of their cloud apps, according to a report from Enterprise Strategy Group.

Companies are eager to harness the agility and flexibility of containers and Kubernetes, but they’re struggling to ensure they’ve got security and compliance covered. More than half of companies responding to our “State of Container and Kubernetes Security” survey cited security as the biggest concern about their container strategy.

Security for containers and Kubernetes has evolved quickly. First-generation container security solutions focused on implementing security controls at the container/host layer. While that approach supports multiple orchestrators (e.g., Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS, Kubernetes, Mesosphere, Pivotal Cloud Foundry), it is no longer relevant because the industry has consolidated around Kubernetes as the de facto orchestrator of choice for cloud-native applications. By applying controls at the container layer, these first-generation solutions create significant scale and operational challenges, since security controls conflict with the orchestrator.

In contrast, StackRox’s container security platform is purpose-built for Kubernetes — the core of the “simple idea” that drove Venky Ganesan, partner at Menlo Ventures, to invest in StackRox. One of the guiding principles of our Kube-native architecture is that Kubernetes, as the control plane for infrastructure, is the right place to implement security controls. This approach ensures that security controls are aligned with the orchestrator and that security is “built in” rather than “bolted on.” Our unique approach aligns with DevSecOps principles of integrating security into agile IT and DevOps workflows as seamlessly and transparently as possible. And our Kubernetes-native architecture ensures DevOps teams and developers retain the agility and speed they need to innovate for the business.

The StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform is at the heart of our business momentum. Our customers apply our security capabilities across the build, deploy, and runtime phases of their application development, tapping us to serve a broad set of use cases, including: Vulnerability Management, Regulatory Compliance, Network Segmentation, Configuration Management, Threat Detection, Incident Response, and Risk Profiling.

The best part of the customer experience? They get our platform up and running in less than 30 minutes and immediately see where deployments fall short of industry benchmarks, are missing key DevOps or Security best practices, or fail to adhere to regulatory controls. See what we can show you about your environment — take StackRox for a spin!

That our customers derive immediate and ongoing value from the StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform has driven our record growth in the first half of this year. We exceeded our pre-COVID revenue targets and grew revenue 240% with both new customers and strong expansion within existing customers, spanning cloud-native innovators, large enterprises, and Federal government agencies.

And customers rave about what StackRox has done for them in reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and G2 — we have more reviews, with higher ratings, than any of our friends in the industry, with customers heralding our Kube-native approach, ease of deployment, and end-to-end security capabilities. We’re excited to apply this new funding to both our R&D efforts and our global expansion, as we continue to drive technical innovation and launch overseas offices.

In the midst of these major business milestones, I want to share our deepest gratitude. To our customers — we would not be here without you, and we remain committed to exceeding your expectations and being your security partner on your digital transformation journey. To our cloud platform partners, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM/Red Hat, and Rancher — working together to enable our joint customers to innovate rapidly and safely continues to be exhilarating.

And to our team — I’m so proud of your commitment to our customers, our partners, each other, and our company. I am humbled to be a part of the amazing journey StackRox is on, and I couldn’t be more excited for our future.

Stay safe and healthy!

Kamal Shah



*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Container Security Blog on StackRox authored by The Container Security Blog on StackRox. Read the original post at: https://www.stackrox.com/post/2020/09/our-26.5m-round-growth-built-on-sea-change-of-kubernetes-and-devsecops/