Several leading venture capital investors have thrown their backing behind Tigera Inc., a rising star in the software container ecosystem that focuses on cybersecurity.

The startup today announced that it has raised a $30 million funding round from Insight Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, New Enterprise Associates and Wing VC.

The financing brings Tigera’s total outside capital to $53 million. Insight, which led the round, also counts container pioneer Docker Inc. among its portfolio companies.

Containers enable developers to deploy software in a lightweight, portable package that can run across different kinds of infrastructure. This flexibility is driving more and more enterprises to adopt the technology in their application projects. Most companies that operate large-scale container environments manage their containers with Kubernetes, an open-source framework created by Google LLC.

Tigera offers a platform for ensuring that deployments of the framework meet security standards. The software is used in the Kubernetes services of all four major cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and IBM Corp., along with Docker’s distribution of the framework.

Tigera Secure Enterprise Edition focuses mainly on the networking side of security operations. According to the startup, the platform can encrypt the traffic flowing between containers and individually verify each individual connection request. The algorithms under the hood decide whether or not to allow a requests based on factors such as the attributes of the network from which they’re sent.

After each connection, Tigera platform creates a log in an audit trail to provide a record of the event. The idea is to help companies not only secure their environments, but also prove that the infrastructure is properly protected to regulators and other relevant parties.

That’s not nearly as straightforward to accomplish with traditional network protection tools. Containerized applications are typically deployed as a collection of loosely connected modules and tend to change on a regular basis, which makes it difficult to verify their security status. Tigera claims that its platform is specifically built to address the unique challenges involved in this task.

Today’s funding is intended to help the startup reach more enterprises with its message. The startup will use the capital to hire additional salespeople and open a new Canadian office in order to tap the local talent pool.

Photo: Tigera