Tigera, a San Francisco-based start-up that helps companies connect and secure their containerized applications, announced today that it has raised an additional $ 10 million in a roundtable led by Madrona Venture Group, with the participation of New England Associates (NEA) and Wing Venture Capital. Soma Somasegar, managing partner of Madrona, will join the board of directors of the company. With that, Tigera has now raised a total of $ 23 million.
As companies have begun adopting containers and the microservice model they allow, it is becoming increasingly clear that the complexity of managing and securing remains a problem. This is especially true for large companies that want to integrate these "native cloud" capabilities into their existing infrastructure or as part of a multi-cloud strategy that can include public and private clouds.
"While containers have been raging for 18-24 months, the complexity of this technology is rapidly escalating to an unmanageable level in terms of connectivity and application security," Madrona's Somasegar writes in the news. Announcement today. "In fact, this has often been the point of discussion for those who hesitate to adopt them too deeply."
Tigera offers these companies a secure application connectivity solution based on its CNX platform. CNX combines a service mesh (based on the Istio project) with management, security and networking solutions (based on Project Calico flannel). The service focuses on securing applications – not just the underlying infrastructure.
This is essentially a Zero Trust approach to application connectivity. The good old firewall used to protect your intranet will not be very useful when your applications will be hosted on multiple clouds, after all.
All major cloud providers have already integrated Tigera's open source tools as a network policy provider for their managed Kubernetes container engines, including AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM.
Tigera Vice President of Marketing, Andy Wright, tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to invest in product management and to expand its engagement with new and existing customers. "We want to make sure that every organization on the planet that builds modern application architectures is aware of the value we can create for them," says Wright. "To achieve this, we need to set up a business marketing organization to provide valuable content to help educate the market and stimulate demand."
Like most companies, Tigera has not been able to disclose its customers, but Wright tells me that they include "two of the largest SaaS companies," as well as two major service companies and a large automobile company. ]
Tigera decided to opt for an "open core" model that combines open source with the closed tools of the company to expand its business. "We are deeply passionate about open source and believe that the fastest way to drive innovation and adoption is through the open source community," says Wright. "We are also passionate about building the next big business software company. We are now working with traditional companies that have very different needs in the cloud world. To achieve both of these goals, we have adopted an open basic model. "
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