Milestone: Announcing our 9.5M series A!
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 cheque 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 in 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, product and business.
Some great coverage here and here !
The Beginning
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 & 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 BlackHat), 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, and removing who we are not.
Pandemic & The Series A
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 last 5–6 months. Investors looked at this as a significant validation of our tech & product, strategy & execution during the pandemic.
Whats Next?
This new round of funding will help us drive broader adoption of enterprise and community versions. We have a handful of exciting product announcements, especially around our community & 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 huge inbounds from) and APAC.
A Big Thank You
I am super proud of what my 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 to our early customers for trusting us with their critical cloud native workloads and their feedback & inputs that helped us iterate and continue to shape us as a product and as a company.
Come Join Us!
We can’t do this alone! We are building teams in 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 know more.
