Tigera Raises $30 Million Series B Led by Insight Venture Partners

Tigera, an enterprise software company providing security and compliance solutions for Kubernetes platforms, announced the closing of its Series B funding round of $30 million led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Madrona, NEA, and Wing. Tigera plans to use the new funding to accelerate growth to meet the growing demand of its Kubernetes security and compliance solution at a critical time as Kubernetes gains traction in the enterprise.

“Kubernetes is gaining momentum within every progressive enterprise,” said Ratan Tipirneni, president and CEO of Tigera. “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.”

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Modern microservices based architectures are built using containers and orchestrated using Kubernetes and present a unique challenge for legacy security and compliance solutions since these new workloads are highly dynamic and ephemeral. This new architecture creates an explosion of internal, or east-west traffic that must be evaluated and secured by the network and security operations teams. These teams have traditionally used firewalls to secure network traffic – which works well to defend against external attacks but aren’t effective in handling threats from the inside. Additionally, given the highly dynamic nature of these workloads, traditional audit based compliance models break down and a Continuous Compliance model is required.

Tigera Secure Enterprise Edition (TSEE) secures Kubernetes environments and ensures continuous compliance using a declarative model similar to Kubernetes. Under the hood, TSEE authenticates all service-to-service communication using multiple sources of identity, 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. All connection details are logged in a compliance-ready format that is also used for incident management and security forensic analysis.

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Tigera is the leader in Kubernetes security and compliance. Their software has become ubiquitous within the Kubernetes ecosystem and is being used by large enterprises that have adopted Kubernetes. Their software has been OEMed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud to run their managed Kubernetes Services; as well as commercial Kubernetes distributions including Docker, Red Hat Open Shift, and Canonical. Their blend of cloud and on-premises solutions enable interoperability of security policies between multiple clouds and on-premises environments which prevents cloud lock-in for Enterprises.

“Tigera is uniquely positioned in the security market as a vast majority of enterprises have chosen to use the open source platform Kubernetes,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight Venture Partners. “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.”

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