Sysdig — Securing the New Frontier of Container and Cloud-first Architectures
By Sam Fort, Kevin Tu, and Delaney Ugelstad, DFJ Growth
DFJ Growth is thrilled to announce our investment in Sysdig, the emerging leader in container and cloud-first security, as part of its $188 million Series F funding round.
At DFJ Growth we’ve been actively investing over the past decade in the rise of the cloud. We have partnered with companies including Box, Yammer, and Anaplan in the early days of cloud apps, to more recent leaders such as Unity, Stripe, and Hopin, all based on the thesis that the cloud is driving a profound shift in how businesses operate.
Though still in its early innings, cloud adoption hit an inflection point in 2020 when companies suddenly needed to support distributed workforces and virtual-first experiences due to the Covid pandemic.
Enterprises doubled down on digital transformation and pulled forward their adoption of modern software architectures. Simultaneously, containers and Kubernetes cemented themselves as the new standard for implementing microservices, and security became more intertwined with the development process.
Securing the New Frontier
This new paradigm ushers in a host of new challenges, including an expanded attack surface and a more dynamic run-time environment — both of which require novel solutions to monitor and secure. We’re hearing the same story from CISOs and security leaders, who often cite security concerns as the primary roadblock to cloud and container adoption. Last-gen security vendors simply aren’t tailored for these modern architectures, nor do they address the need for security to be embedded in every part of the software development lifecycle.
Historically, every major shift in IT architecture has birthed a new security category to protect it, and we expect that pattern to repeat itself for cloud and containers.
Enter Sysdig — a secure DevOps platform purpose built for containers, Kubernetes, and the cloud.
The Sysdig Suite Advantage
Sysdig helps enterprises of all sizes confidently run cloud applications by detecting, preventing, and responding to security risks, while enforcing compliance and improving both availability and performance. Sysdig was founded as an open source company, which remains a core part of its DNA and is key to driving bottoms-up adoption among modern developers and enterprises. The Falco and open source sysdig projects serve as the foundation for the platform and have emerged as leading solutions for cloud and container run-time detection and response. Sysdig has also embraced other open source projects such as Anchore Engine for scanning container images, Prometheus for metrics and monitoring, and Cloud Custodian for cloud configurations, unifying them with proprietary workflow, orchestration, and forensics tooling.
As we spent time with the Sysdig product, we were impressed by its ease of use, configurability, and robust set of features.
Sysdig’s open source products have been seeing explosive growth, with 24 million total downloads (1.7 million in the last month alone) and 300% growth in Falco over the past year. Sysdig’s platform spans cloud security posture, cloud workload protection platform, and container monitoring, with 85 percent of new Sysdig customers purchasing the full suite of products, replacing three point solutions. With a long list of enterprise logos including Goldman Sachs, SAP Concur, Yahoo Japan, Comcast, and many more, Sysdig is helping secure some of the largest container and Kubernetes deployments in the world.
A Stellar Team
Sysdig is helmed by Suresh Vasudevan, who we have known and wanted to work with for years. Suresh is a three-time CEO and formerly led Nimble Storage through a trajectory of early hypergrowth to its IPO and eventual sale. Sysdig’s Founder and CTO Loris Degioanni is a pioneer in the container and open source space and is driving a world-class engineering team and product roadmap to take on the massive market opportunity ahead. The broader Sysdig team is 300+ strong, and with this new round is looking to grow significantly over the coming year.
Our team at DFJ Growth is thrilled to partner with Sysdig on this significant funding round as the company pushes forward this exciting category of Secure DevOps!