Security tech start-up ARMO has closed $30 million in funding for its proprietary security project Kubescape, which runs on the open-source platform Kubernetes (commonly known as K8s). The series-A round will ensure an open, transparent and fully customizable security solution for the community of K8s users.
Founded by Shauli Rozen, Leonid Sandler and Ben Hirschberg, ARMO will use the new investment to grow, opening additional offices and hiring internationally, bringing on more developers to work on Kubescape and investing in its open-source community. The company will also expand its product and marketing teams.
ARMO’s Kubescape is being built as the first end-to-end open-source K8s security platform. It has become one of the fastest-growing open-source K8s security tools, with tens of thousands of users and more than 2,500 registered users accessing the cloud software as a service.
Designed for cloud-native applications, K8s is an orchestration solution for containers – lightweight “bundles” of code that can easily run on both developer's computers and production servers. As of yet, however, there is no open-source project that provides an out-of-the-box, end-to-end K8s security solution. Current open-source K8s security tools are limited, fragmented, complex to manage and monitor and require a huge effort to generate synergies, forcing organizations into closed source solutions, which for many is less than ideal.
“DevOps teams are responsible for the security of Kubernetes and they prefer to use an open source for it, but they also need the solution to be end-to-end and fit natively into their existing stack,” said Shauli Rozen, CEO & co-founder of ARMO. “Companies are being forced to choose: either try to integrate several different open source tools together or commit to a proprietary solution that you can’t adapt, access the code, influence the roadmap or contribute to.”
ARMO’s focus on remaining open source exemplifies the spirit of the K8s community. “Kubernetes is open source, and Kubernetes security should be open source too, following the same culture of transparency and collaboration,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global, which led the investment round. “ARMO is unique because they’re committed to a complete open source security solution for Kubernetes, so everyone can benefit from – and contribute to – the most secure platform available.”