Chainguard, a start-up created by ex-Google software engineers to build and sell “hardened-by-default” open-source components, has raised $356 million in a Series D round led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP.
The Kirkland, Wash. company said new investors Salesforce Ventures and Datadog Ventures joined the round.
The cash infusion brings Chainguard’s total funding to about $612 million since its $5 million seed in 2021 and prices the company at $3.5 billion, according to a note from CEO Dan Lorenc.
Chainguard began by shipping pre-secured Linux container images that plug straight into Kubernetes environments and Lorenc now boasts that its catalog has grown from 400 to 1,400 images in the past year, pushing revenue from $5 million to $40 million.
He said the company now counts north of 100 paying enterprise customers and is forecasting more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue for 2025.
The company listed a roster of major organizations using its products, including ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oceaneering International, Snap Inc., Univar Solutions, VPBank, and Wiz.
Under the hood is what the firm calls its “software factory,” an automated build system that continuously patches and signs more than 13,000 upstream open-source packages git repositories to build the 1,400 container images that Chainguard now sells.
Lorenc said the same factory pipeline has produced two new products called Chainguard VMs and Chainguard Libraries as the company pursues enterprise customers with secure-by-default offerings.
“We’re moving both up and down the stack to secure and harden even more open source,” Lorenc said. ““We can’t be the safe source for open source without securing all open source.”
Chainguard’s investors are making a massive bet that the rash of supply-chain incidents, from the xz-utils backdoor to the most recent malicious GitHub Action updates, will keep compliance teams hunting for off-the-shelf components that need less day-to-day triage.
Chainguard plans to use the Series D to hire across engineering and sales and to widen the list of open-source projects it supports.
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