Container environment security startup Sysdig Inc. joined the unicorn club today after raising $188 million in a late-stage funding round.

The Series F round, led by Third Point Ventures and Premji Invest with participation from Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, DFJ Growth, Goldman Sachs, Insight Partners and Next47, brings Sysdig’s value to $1.18 billion, the company said.

Sysdig, which last raised $70 million in January 2020, sells tools for securing container environments that are used to host modern software applications that can run on any computing platform. Its main product is Sysdig Monitor, a cloud-native intelligence platform that helps manage large deployments of containers

It does so by listing the different network connections to each instance within a cluster, displaying the traffic each one handles and the bandwidth being used. The platform is based on two open-source projects the company leads: its namesake “sysdig” forensics platform and the “Sysdig Falco” security project. The software works together to secure deployments of application containers.

Sysdig’s other main tool is Sysdig Secure, which works by tapping into the data produced by system calls generated in a container environment. Those are the requests that application components send to the operating system on which they run when certain key actions need to be performed.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Sysdig Chief Executive Officer Suresh Vasudevan (pictured) said his company is unique in the security software world in that all of its offerings are based on open-source technology, which enables more transparency about how its tools work and gives users more control.

“Innovations are delivered faster with the community working together,” Vasudevan said. “Security has historically not been open and Sysdig is leading the charge in ensuring the future of security will be open from now on.”

The company says its tools are used at “hundreds of leading enterprises,” including the likes of SAP SE, Yahoo Japan Corp. and The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Sysdig’s tools also integrate with IBM Corp. through the IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig offering launched last year, which it says is now used by hundreds of that company’s customers to scale up container monitoring and security.

Vasudevan said Sysdig also has strong relationships with Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC and their respective cloud platforms. For example, Sysdig is an APN Advanced Technology Partner and a Public Sector Partner of AWS and all of its tools are available through that company’s cloud marketplace, he said. In addition, Sysdig is an Anthos Ready Google Cloud partner.

In its release announcing today’s round, Sysdig reeled off a list of impressive numbers relating to its growth over the last year. It said its new annual contract value added in the second half of its fiscal 2021 year was 2.3 times bigger than what it added in the same period one year before. It now counts more than 450 enterprise customers with an average annual recurring revenue of more than $500,000. Meanwhile, adoption of the open-source Falco project has grown by more than 300% in the last year, with almost 24 million downloads.

The company has expanded its presence in other ways too, for example by integrating its tools with another popular open-source monitoring tool called Prometheus. It said that integration has enabled it to expand its total addressable market significantly beyond container security to the broader cloud security segment.

Bain Capital Ventures Partner Enrique Salem, who is joining Sysdig’s board of directors, said he was most impressed by the company’s DevOps-based approach to securing application containers.

“The current security stack based on a firewall mentality and promoted by incumbents is irrelevant in the cloud,” Salem said. “Sysdig takes a secure DevOps approach, allowing teams to ship cloud apps faster while managing security risk. They built on an open-source security stack, which we see accelerates innovation and adoption.”

Vasudevan said Sysdig will use the money to invest in “continued innovation” in the open-source projects that serve as the foundation of its platform. Those innovations will be focused on several key strategic themes, with new capabilities and advancements around container image scanning, network segmentation, runtime threat detection and incident response all on the menu, he said.

In addition, Sysdig will be looking to expand its cloud security capabilities by “building on our CSPM foundation, expanding coverage across public clouds, and expanding on our unique ability to do real-time threat detection in public clouds,” Vasudevan said.

The company also plans to grow its research and development teams in Raleigh, Spain, Italy, Belgrade and San Francisco, as well as its sales and marketing operations in both existing and new markets.

“The container and cloud security market is on fire and we saw accelerated revenue growth, strong customer adoption of our platform and open source community engagement during 2020,” Vasudevan said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE