Bolstered by a 240% increase in revenue for the first half of this year, StackRox has raked in $26.5 million in funding. The funding, which StackRox called a "Series B-1" round, will be used to expand its business into new geographies, such as the recently announced EMEA region, and to continue its R&D efforts across its Kubernetes-native security solutions.
The funding round was led Menlo Ventures along with participation from Highland Capital Partners and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise as well as with StackRox's existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures. To date, StackRox, which was founded four years ago, has raised over $60 million, according to Crunchbase. StackRox's customer base includes Reddit, Zendisk and Splunk, as well as government customers.
Google-developed Kubernetes is now the hands-down de facto standard for orchestrating and managing containers across public and private clouds. Telco service providers and enterprises have started to use containers to help them manage their multi-cloud environments as well as scale out new services and applications for edge computing, 5G and IoT.
Hyperscale cloud service providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Google, Amazon Web Services and Facebook pioneered the initial adoption of container software in their data centers, but some telcos are just starting to get their feet wet
Containers are lightweight, standalone, executable packages of software code that share an operating system, such as Linux, that that can run large distributed applications. Since containers have the bare minimum software that's needed to run an application, they can be more efficient than virtual machines (VMs).
RELATED: Container and Kubernetes use ramps up, but security still a concern - report
StackRox can attribute some of this year's revenue growth to the coronavirus pandemic, which has further fueled the shift to more applications and workloads moving to the cloud, as well as sending millions of employees home for work.
StackRox's Kubernetes-native architecture has helped its customers adapt to changing business conditions and secure their cloud-native applications as they support remote work and embrace DevSecOps.
"Companies are adopting containers and Kubernetes at a record pace to enable the rapid application development that's needed for business innovation. The pandemic has heightened the urgency for innovation, and remote work has added far greater security demands," said StackRox CEO Kamal Shah, StackRox, in a statement. "Our Kubernetes-native solution enables a true Security-as-Code approach to DevSecOps and protecting cloud-native applications, delivering security that is built in, not bolted on. As a result, we're seeing substantial growth in demand for our Kubernetes-native security platform compared to legacy container security solutions."
According to research by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), close to 80% of the organizations in a survey said they were running Kubernetes in production, and that the deployments will continue to grow in size. StackRox has seen a spike in demand for the adoption of Kubernetes-security across various industry verticals including cloud-native developers, global enterprises and the federal government.
RELATED: VMware to buy Kubernetes security startup Octarine
Mountain View, Calif.—based StackRox primarily competes against Aqua, Palo Alto Prisma Cloud and Octarine, the latter of which was bought by VMware earlier this year. Currently, StackRox has 62 employees but expects to have around 92 by this time next year, according to a company spokesperson.