I’m super excited to announce that we have raised $9.5M Series A, led by cyber security powerhouse Allegis Cyber. Sonae IM, a cyber & infrastructure focused investment fund based in Europe with a global mandate participated along with our pre-seed investor Chiratae Ventures, who wrote me the first check even before we had a team or a product in place.
This is a huge milestone for us as Allegis Cyber and Sonae IM join us on our mission to protect the cloud native continuum. Given their hands-on operating background and deep cyber security expertise, we couldn’t have asked for better partners as we accelerate building out our team, products, and business.
It all started in 2017, towards the end of it actually. I was coming off of my earlier gig in application security while exploring and pitching what would deploying ‘Security as a Microservice’ mean. When everyone was getting excited about the possibilities of containers and microservices, it made sense to think of deploying security in a similar vein. After having pitched to 50+ security practitioners (which I would chase at RSA and Black Hat), we started feeling the contours of a potential tech approach and features. My co-founders Shyam (my ex-colleague at Juniper), and Swarup who was wrapping up his post-doc in security and privacy at CMU, joined forces and we spent next 18–24 months building the tech and product with design partners and early adopters. Continuously iterating, defining and tuning who we are, including who we are not.
COVID accelerated two things certainly – cloud migration and security threats targeted towards cloud workloads.
Despite initial period of uncertainty and budget cuts, we were able to more than double our customer base and revenues in just over the last 5–6 months. Investors looked at this as a significant validation of our tech and product, as well as strategy and execution during the pandemic.
This new round of funding will help us drive broader adoption of our enterprise and community products. We have a handful of exciting product announcements, especially around our community and open source efforts, stay tuned!
The funding also enables us to work with various partners, and unlock broader geographies including NA, EMEA (where we see significant inbound interest), and APAC.
I am super proud of what our small team has built over last couple of years. The kind of technology that we are building at Deepfence typically has a long incubation cycle and takes multiple iterations to get it right. I am thankful for our early customers for trusting us with their critical cloud native workloads and their feedback and input has helped us iterate and continue to shape us as a product and as a company.
We can’t do this alone! We are building teams in the Bay Area and Bangalore (including fully remote positions) and hiring across engineering, security research, product, sales, and marketing. Please reach out to us at careers at deepfence dot io to learn more.
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