Infrastructure-as-code security startup Oak9 Inc. has raised $8 million in new funding to grow its free Community Edition and help launch a next-generation “Security as Code” offering.

The round was led by Menlo Ventures and included Cisco Investments, Morgan Stanley’s Next Level Fund and HPA. Including the new funding, the company has raised $13.9 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Founded in 2019, Oak9 offers a cloud security platform designed to accelerate delivery and provide comprehensive security. The company’s Security as Code platform continuously finds, analyzes and remediates security and compliance issues in real time as changes occur in IaC and deployed cloud workloads.

Oak9 pitches its platform as providing cloud-native security uniquely delivered as code within developer toolsets. Users can use their favorite IaC languages, cloud or multicloud, continuous integration and delivery tools and more. The service also offers entire systems development life cycle automation that natively secures existing workflows and assesses every change to cloud-native infrastructure pre- and post-deployment.

The company’s proprietary SaC blueprints support 20-plus compliance standards, including HIPAA, HITRUST, PCI, SOC2 and ISO27001. Oak9’s open-sourced Security as Code also enables security engineers to extend Oak9 security blueprints for additional guard rails.

Oak9 has seen strong continuous momentum in 2022, including moving into a new global headquarters in Chicago and opening a new office in India. Notable customers include SmartBear Software Inc., Avant LLC, FourKites Inc., Contentstack Inc., CohesionIB Inc. and Edge Delta Inc.

The company also partners with HashiCorp Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. and supports the Cloud Security Alliance and Open Web Application Security Project.

“It’s a critical time in the IaC security space,” Oak9 co-founder and Chief Executive Raj Datta said in a statement. “We’re seeing it all over the market — companies simply cannot hire enough security engineers to ensure proper security in their IaC and cloud environments.”

“Budgets across the industry are being slashed and many companies are short on talent at a time when we need more of it, not less,” Datta added. “Oak9 helps alleviate that problem, reducing both costs and exposure by automating security so you can do more with less.”

Image: Oak9