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As a provider of software solutions for governance, compliance, security, and automation of production Kubernetes workloads and clusters, Nirmata has created Kyverno – a policy engine designed for Kubernetes. Nirmata has now raised $4.0 million in pre-series A funding to help its Kubernetes policy engine scale even faster.
As enterprises accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies, Nirmata’s Kyverno solution is providing the essential method with native tools and language to secure containers for enterprises deploying resources in cloud environments. With this new funding, Nirmata plans to expand its Kyverno product and operations to better serve the Kyverno community, as well as develop an engineering team in India and expand its sales and marketing to speed up adoption.
The $4 million 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.
“As enterprises adopt cloud applications and Kubernetes, applying and managing security policies is becoming increasingly challenging,” said Arun Ramamoorthy, Founding Partner, Z5 Capital. “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.”
Policy-as-Code
This funding follows Nirmata’s extraordinary year, and comes at a time when Kyverno has experienced significant growth, highlighted by growing open-source acceptance. Kyverno’s adoption has skyrocketed to over six million downloads since its launch in early 2021, with a growing list of users including Novartis, The New York Times, Duke Energy, TriNet, Grofers, and others. Open-source projects like as Flux, KubeArmor, and others use it.
Nirmata Policy Manager for Kyverno (PMK) was released in May 2021 to simplify Kyverno adoption across many clusters and to support Policy-as-Code best practices by allowing Kyverno policies to be deployed across fleets of clusters via GitOp.
“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 (CEO) and co-founder of 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 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,” said Yashwanth Hemaraj, Partner, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV). “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.”
