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Kirkland, Wash.-based cybersecurity startup Chainguard announced a $140 million Series C investment, elevating its valuation to $1.12 billion and crowning it as the Seattle region’s newest unicorn.
This funding round comes less than a year after Chainguard raised $61 million in a Series B round. The company has seen its customer base grow fivefold year-over-year, with a 175% increase in annual recurring revenue.
Founded in 2021, Chainguard specializes in helping customers secure their “software supply chain,” a term that describes a company’s software production process.
Chainguard focuses on securing open source software and offers tools to manage container images. Its customers include Anduril, Canva, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Snowflake, and others.
“We’ve demonstrated to our customers and the industry that there is a better way to align developer and security priorities for adopting open source software securely,” said Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc in a statement. “The complexity and scale of vulnerability management have outgrown the capabilities of most organizations to handle independently.”
In a LinkedIn post, Lorenc noted that “the rate of open source adoption in enterprises has surged over the past few years, accompanied by shifts in its development and consumption methods.”
“Existing solutions haven’t kept pace or scaled to these new methods,” he wrote. “Our Chainguard Images platform offers a secure, trusted way to build software on containers through a fully-managed open source supply chain.”
Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and IVP led the Series C round, with contributions from Amplify, Mantis VC, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
“Chainguard is one of the fastest-growing enterprise businesses we’ve encountered in recent years, and we are thrilled to join this mission to set the industry standard for software security,” Sai Senthilkumar, partner at Redpoint Ventures, said in a statement.
Lorenc, a former engineer at Microsoft and Google, is based in Rhode Island. He co-founded Chainguard with Ville Aikas, Matt Moore, and Scott Nichols, all former Google and VMWare engineers based in the Seattle area, and Kim Lewandowski, a former Google product manager based in the Bay Area. Nichols left Chainguard in 2022.
To date, Chainguard has raised a total of $256 million in funding and employs roughly 150 people.
New unicorns, or billion-dollar startups, have become increasingly rare in the Seattle region over the past few years, reflecting a national trend as valuations have declined amid a broader venture capital slowdown.
