Tigera, a San Francisco-based enterprise software company that provides security and compliance solutions for Kubernetes platforms, has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors Madrona, NEA, and Wing also participated in this round. With this round of funding, Tigera is going to accelerate its growth to meet the growing demand of its Kubernetes security and compliance solution.
“Kubernetes is gaining momentum within every progressive enterprise,” said Tigera president and CEO Ratan Tipirneni. “These businesses cannot get their applications to production without strong security controls and the ability to prove compliance. As a result, we are being pulled into several hundred projects and will use this funding to meet that demand.”
As modern microservices based architectures are built using containers and utilizing Kubernetes, it presents a challenge for legacy security and compliance solutions as new workloads are dynamic and ephemeral. This new architecture creates internal traffic that must be evaluated and secured by the network and security operations teams. These teams traditionally use firewalls for securing network traffic — which is able to defend against external attacks but cannot handle threats from the inside. Given the dynamic nature of the workloads, traditional audit based compliances breakdown and a Continuous Compliance model is required.
Tigera Secure Enterprise Edition (TSEE) secures Kubernetes environments and ensures continuous compliance using a declarative model that is similar to Kubernetes. And TSEE authenticates all service-to-service communication using multiple sources of identity. Plus it authorizes each service based on multi-factor rules, encrypts network traffic, and enforces security policies at the edge of the host, pod, and container within the infrastructure for a defense in depth security model under-the-hood.
Considered a leader in Kubernetes security and compliance, Tigera’s software is being used by large enterprises that have adopted Kubernetes. For example, its software has been OEMed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud for running managed Kubernetes Services and commercial Kubernetes distributions such as Docker, Red Hat Open Shift, and Canonical.
“Tigera is uniquely positioned in the security market as a vast majority of enterprises have chosen to use the open source platform Kubernetes,” added Insight Venture Partners co-founder and managing director Jeff Horing. “The market is growing rapidly both with the adoption of Kubernetes and also with enterprises now ready to go to production – and security and compliance are top of mind. We welcome Tigera to our portfolio and look forward to helping them scale their business.”
