Follow-up: Chainguard doesn’t have an office. Here’s how the $3.5B cybersecurity startup makes remote work.
Chainguard announced another big investment on Wednesday as the cybersecurity startup looks to continue fueling growth.
The company raised $356 million in a Series D round that pushes its valuation to $3.5 billion. The round was co-led by new investor Kleiner Perkins and existing investor IVP.
Chainguard raised $140 million in a Series C round at a $1.12 billion valuation less than a year ago. The company has raised $612 million to date.
Founded in 2021, Chainguard aims to help customers secure their “software supply chain,” a term used to describe a company’s software production line.
Chainguard focuses on helping companies keep their open source software secure and offers tools to manage container images, a core code component of cloud-based applications. It has more than 150 customers, including ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VPBank, and Wiz.
“Open source is everywhere, and the security problems with it present enough risk that people can’t ignore it,” CEO and co-founder Dan Lorenc told GeekWire.
Open source isn’t inherently insecure, he said, but many companies aren’t fully equipped to fix bugs or security issues with code that they haven’t written.
“We hear stories from customers all the time where they’ll run a scan and find out they have 16 million vulnerabilities across all of that open source,” Lorenc said. “That’s not something you can or should spend your time on fixing if you’re an engineer at a company trying to build a product and add value to your customers.”
Chainguard said it grew annual recurring revenue 7X to $40 million in its fiscal year 2025, and plans to reach more than $100 million in ARR before fiscal year 2026.
In a statement, Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins, said that “the speed at which Chainguard has established itself as the go-to provider for trusted open source software is remarkable.”
The company’s headquarters is technically in Kirkland, Wash., just outside of Seattle. But Chainguard operates remotely and has no physical offices. It has more than 350 employees.
Lorenc is a former Microsoft and Google engineer who is based in Rhode Island. He started Chainguard with Ville Aikas, Matt Moore, and Scott Nichols, former engineers at Google and VMWare who are all based in the Seattle region, in addition to Kim Lewandowski, a former Google product manager based in the Bay Area. Nichols left the company in 2022.
In a LinkedIn post, Lorenc said the funding will help “accelerate our mission to be the safe source for open source,” and that “the old ways of building and using open source software don’t work anymore.”
Salesforce Ventures and Datadog Ventures joined as investors in the Series D round, which also included existing backers Sequoia, Spark, Amplify, Redpoint, Lightspeed, Mantis, and Kerrest & Co.
