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Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc. (LinkedIn Photo)
Kirkland, Wash.-based cybersecurity startup Chainguard announced a $140 million Series C investment, bumping its valuation to $1.12 billion and minting the Seattle region’s newest unicorn.
The funding comes less than a year after Chainguard raised a $61 million Series B round. The company’s customer base has quintupled year-over-year and annual recurring revenue is up 175%.
Founded in 2021, Chainguard aims to help customers secure their “software supply chain,” a term used to describe a company’s software production line.
Chainguard focuses on helping companies keep their open source software secure and offers tools to manage container images, a core code component of cloud-based applications. Customers include Anduril, Canva, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Snowflake, and others.
“We’ve shown our customers and the industry there is a better way to align developer and security priorities when it comes to adopting open source software securely,” Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc said in a statement. “The complexity and scale of vulnerability management has outgrown the capabilities of most organizations to manage on their own.”
In a LinkedIn post, Lorenc wrote that “the rate at which open source is consumed in enterprises has increased dramatically over the last few years, and the ways in which it is developed and consumed have shifted as well.”
“Existing solutions haven’t kept up with the pace or scaled to the new methods,” he wrote. “Our Chainguard Images platform provides a safe, trusted way to build software on top of containers through a fully-managed open source supply chain.”
Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and IVP led the Series C round, which included participation from Amplify, Mantis VC, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
“Chainguard is one of the fastest growing enterprise businesses we have seen in the past several years and we could not be more thrilled to join on this mission to build the industry standard for software security,” Sai Senthilkumar, partner at Redpoint Ventures, said in a statement.
Lorenc is a former Microsoft and Google engineer who is based in Rhode Island. He started Chainguard with Ville Aikas, Matt Moore, and Scott Nichols, former engineers at Google and VMWare who are all based in the Seattle region, in addition to Kim Lewandowski, a former Google product manager based in the Bay Area. Nichols left the company in 2022.
Total funding to date for Chainguard is $256 million. The company employs about 150 people.
New unicorns, or billion-dollar startups, have been harder to spot in the Seattle region in the past few years, mirroring a trend nationally as valuations took a hit amid the broader venture capital slowdown.
