Today marks a major milestone in the Anchore journey.
Just a little over 3 years since we opened our doors, we have secured a substantial $20M round of funding that will allow us to address the next wave of container users around the world. I am utterly pleased and totally blown away by what a team of a little less than 20 has achieved in such a short period of time. Like I experienced in the early days of Ansible, just a thousand lines of code and few pages of documentation - built to address an existing gap in the market by smart, capable engineers - can drive ubiquitous adoption in a very short period of time.
While building the Ansible brand a few years back, I had an opportunity to speak to customers and partners and see how containers, and Kubernetes, were transforming the way companies innovate. I quickly became convinced that the next generation compute platform would heavily leverage containers, and security would become key. Today, Gartner predicts that more than 75% of global companies will deploy containers in some capacity by 2022, and the total addressable market is estimated to be $2.1B by the year 2024 by MarketsandMarkets.
Dan Nurmi, Anchore co-founder, and I knew there was a tremendous opportunity. Needing to better understand the security and compliance needs around containers, we decided to build a SaaS platform to test our assumptions. Thousands of users quickly adopted the platform, providing us critical directional feedback on the challenges users and organizations were facing. We have since used that experience to deliver what is now called Anchore Enterprise, our flagship product that is currently in use at large scale by many Fortune 1000 companies including Cisco and eBay, and is even considered a mandatory part of the United States Department of Defense DevSecOps reference architecture.
Anchore’s mission is to empower developers to secure their container workflows in a manner that does not disrupt, distract or encumber them, allowing them to innovate at their own pace. Until now, software workload security has largely been addressed at runtime, but more and more we’re seeing that the majority of issues can be caught more easily during the software development lifecycle. That’s why we want to help organizations shift security left, ensuring that issues are found earlier through seamless integration with all major CICD platforms - whether deployed on-premises, in the public cloud, or through integration with GitHub Actions.
But Anchore is more than just the technology we build. An internal company mandate has been to build both our products and our team with the same core principles that guided Ansible: kindness and accountability. Our goal was never to get from A to B in the shortest possible time; instead, to allow our longer-term vision to be realized while truly enjoying the journey of working with others. I am, once again, thrilled by the fact that those same principles led to another great outcome.
Finally, in the journey to build a global brand, we’ve embarked on hiring great talent with strong open source and enterprise IT expertise. Our office locations already span both coasts, with team members in many US states and soon Europe. We are a fairly distributed team and we’re expecting aggressive growth in the many months to come.
