Nirmata Raises $4 Million in Pre-Series a Funding to Capitalize on the Full Potential of Kubernetes Native Policy Management, Kyverno

Launched in early 2021, the open-source project generated over six million downloads; New investment to accelerate adoption by supporting the global Kyverno community, establishing new engineering team in India and delivering solutions around Kyverno

Nirmata, the software solutions provider for governance, compliance, security, and automation of production Kubernetes workloads and clusters, and creators of Kyverno, the leading policy engine designed for Kubernetes, announced it has raised $4.0 million in pre-series A funding to further accelerate the growth of Kyverno. The new investment was led by Z5 Capital with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures, Samsung Next, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) and angel investors Saqib Syed and BV Jagadeesh.

This funding builds upon an exceptional year for Nirmata and comes as Kyverno achieved considerable growth punctuated by the increased adoption of open source. Since the beginning of 2021, Kyverno’s adoption quickly soared to over six million downloads, with a growing number of users including Novartis, The New York Times, Duke Energy, TriNet, Grofers and others. It is used by open source projects like Flux, KubeArmor and others. In May 2021, Nirmata Policy Manager for Kyverno (PMK) was launched to streamline the adoption of Kyverno across multiple clusters as well as facilitate Policy-as-Code best practices by enabling the deployment of Kyverno policies across fleets of clusters using GitOps workflows.

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With this new investment, the company will scale its product and operations to support the Kyverno community and establish an engineering team in India as well as grow its sales and marketing to accelerate its adoption.

Key Milestones

• Accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project in November 2020
• More than 6 million downloads in less than six months
• More than 1,200 GitHub stars

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As containers are spun up quickly, the growing demands placed upon developers often leaves a security gap that exposes potential threats and risks in the configuration settings. In 2018 and 2019 exposed breaches caused by cloud misconfigurations resulted in nearly 33.4 billion records in total. According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2019 report, the average cost per lost record globally is $150. Multiplied by the number of records exposed, misconfigurations cost companies worldwide nearly $5 trillion in 2018 and 2019 alone. As enterprises accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies, Nirmata’s Kyverno is providing the essential method with native tools and language to secure containers for enterprises deploying resources in cloud environments.

“Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility in the way that workloads are deployed. Yet developers may not know 80% of what needs to be configured, nor should they. Kyverno gives users the ability to focus on what matters – their workloads and applications – by aiding the adoption of Kubernetes policies rather than requiring users to learn and adopt new ones,” said Jim Bugwadia, Chief Executive Officer, Nirmata. “We’re at the cutting edge of this innovation and are thrilled to be working with our partners at Z5 Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, Samsung Next and BV Jagadeesh, Saqib Syed to accelerate the execution of our vision.”

Nirmata’s mission is to enable the automated management of cloud native applications in an infrastructure agnostic manner. To achieve this, policy-based management is critical for achieving autonomy across roles while keeping alignment to organizational goals and standards.

Analysts Underscore the Widespread Adoption of Kubernetes
“Our survey research indicates Kubernetes use continues to grow, with more than 20% of enterprise organizations that have deployed applications to production in the last year indicating Kubernetes is fully deployed across all of their IT organization and another 32% reporting some adoption at team level.” — Jay Lyman, Senior Research Analyst, 451 Research

Investors Highlight the Critical Need to Manage Cloud Application Changes Using Security Policies
“As enterprises adopt cloud applications and Kubernetes, applying and managing security policies is becoming increasingly challenging. With Kyverno and Policy Manager for Kyverno (PMK), Nirmata offers a simple and elegant Kubernetes Native Policy management approach to secure cloud applications. We are excited to support Nirmata in its mission to help customers solve their Kubernetes governance, compliance and automation challenges.” — Arun Ramamoorthy, Founding Partner, Z5 Capital

“When certain infrastructure becomes pervasive and dominant like Kubernetes has, critical services need to be native, open source, and standards-based. Policy management is one such critical service, and Kyverno is a beautiful open-source CNCF-endorsed native solution that allows policies to be managed as Kubernetes resources.” — Salil Deshpande, General Partner at Uncorrelated Ventures

“Nirmata is well positioned to emerge as the go-to provider for security, automation and operations of Kubernetes workloads and clusters, facilitating application deployments and management for enterprise technology companies around the world. This presents a natural fit with BGV’s Enterprise 4.0 investment thesis, and the Nirmata Policy Manager for Kyverno has gained remarkable traction in recent months. We’re bullish on this space and very excited at Nirmata’s prospects for accelerated growth in the year’s ahead.” — Yashwanth Hemaraj, Partner, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV)

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