Company Overview
About Chainguard
Chainguard is a Seattle, Washington-based software supply chain security company — having raised over $892 million total including a $356 million Series D in April 2025 at a $3.5 billion valuation and an additional $280 million growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund in late 2025 — providing enterprises with hardened open source container images and virtual machine base images rebuilt from source daily with zero known CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures), eliminating the vulnerability debt that accumulates in standard open source distributions. Founded in 2021 by CEO Dan Lorenc (9 years at Google securing code and infrastructure), Kim Lewandowski (Google representative on the Open Source Security Foundation Governing Board), Matt Moore (Google, creator of the original "distroless" container image), and Ville Aikas (co-founder of Kubernetes), Chainguard's founding team pioneered the open source supply chain security concepts — sigstore (code signing), SLSA (supply chain levels for software artifacts), and distroless containers — that became CISA and NIST software security standards. The company grew from ~$5 million ARR in 2023 to $40 million ARR by January 2025 (640% year-over-year growth) and projects exceeding $100 million ARR before end of 2026. Chainguard serves 150+ paying enterprise customers including ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, HPE, Snap, Wiz, and Anduril.
Business Model & Competitive Advantage
Chainguard's minimal container image model addresses the vulnerability accumulation problem that standard open source distributions create for enterprise security teams: a standard Ubuntu or Debian base container image packages hundreds of OS libraries (curl, OpenSSL, Python, glibc) that were included for developer convenience but are unnecessary for production container workloads — creating a CVE surface area of 100-500 known vulnerabilities in base images that security scanners flag but operations teams cannot patch fast enough given daily CVE publication rates. Chainguard's approach (rebuilding each container image from verified source code daily, including only the runtime dependencies each specific workload requires, and generating cryptographically signed SBOMs — software bills of materials — for each build) produces container images with zero known CVEs at the time of release, reducing the vulnerability backlog that security teams must triage and eliminating the attacker surface from unused library packages.
Competitive Landscape 2025–2026
In 2025, Chainguard competes in the software supply chain security, container security, and open source software governance market with Red Hat (private/IBM subsidiary, RHEL and UBI container images), Snyk (private, developer security platform, $7.4B valuation), and Wiz (private, cloud security platform, $16B valuation post-Google-acquisition) for enterprise DevSecOps and container security platform adoption driven by CISA secure-by-default software mandates and SEC cybersecurity disclosure requirements. The $636 million raised in 2025 alone (Series D + General Catalyst growth financing) reflects investor conviction that software supply chain security spending is accelerating as AI-generated code and open source dependency sprawl dramatically expand the attack surface that enterprise security programs must defend. Chainguard's catalog of 1,000+ container images and VMs covers the major open source runtimes (Java, Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, PHP) that enterprise applications depend on. The 2025 strategy focuses on expanding the catalog to cover every significant open source runtime, growing enterprise sales through direct and cloud marketplace channels, and building the AI model security capabilities (securing AI inference container images and model supply chains) that the AI infrastructure market requires.
The Chainguard Story
Founders
Company Timeline
Major milestones in Chainguard's journey
Leadership Team
Meet the leaders behind Chainguard
Dan Lorenc
Dan Lorenc founded Chainguard after nine years at Google working on infrastructure and code security. Based in Austin, he previously worked at Microsoft and is a recognized expert in software supply chain security and open source security tooling.
Matt Moore
Matt Moore worked closely with Dan Lorenc at Google on container software and created the original 'distroless' container image. As CTO, he leads Chainguard's technical vision and product architecture for secure software supply chains.
Kim Lewandowski
Kim Lewandowski served as Product Manager at Google starting in 2014 and represented Google on the Governing Board of the Open Source Security Foundation. She brings deep expertise in product strategy for security and open source.
Ville Aikas
Ville Aikas was one of the original co-founders of Kubernetes and served as a member of the Technical Oversight Committee for Knative. He brings foundational cloud-native expertise to Chainguard's engineering team.
Parm Uppal
Parm Uppal joined Chainguard in 2024 to lead revenue growth as the company scales from $40M to $100M+ ARR. He brings extensive enterprise software sales leadership experience.
Patrick Donahue
Patrick Donahue joined as SVP of Product in 2024 to drive product strategy and expansion of Chainguard's catalog to over 1,000 secure container images and VMs.
Liz Egan
Liz Egan was promoted to CMO to lead Chainguard's marketing strategy and brand development as the company achieves unicorn status and expands its enterprise customer base.
Dustin Kirkland
Dustin Kirkland was elevated to SVP of Engineering to lead technical teams building and maintaining Chainguard's daily-rebuilt catalog of secure software images.
Open Positions
Reddit Discussions
Key Differentiators
Emerging Innovator
Chainguard is an emerging player bringing innovative solutions to the Security market.
Growth Stage
Chainguard has achieved $892M in revenue, demonstrating strong product-market fit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not So Random Others
Zeffy
Zeffy is a Montreal-based fundraising platform for nonprofit organizations that charges zero platform fees on donations — asking donors to optionally contribute a tip to cover Zeffy's operating costs
Oda Studio
Oda Studio is a United States-based AI-powered interior design platform — backed by Y Combinator (W20) — providing homebuyers, renters, and design enthusiasts with AI tools to discover their personal
Cursor
Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built on Visual Studio Code that integrates advanced language models to provide intelligent code completion, generation, debugging, and refactoring capabilities dir
Kindful
Kindful is a donor management and fundraising platform designed for nonprofit organizations to manage relationships, track donations, and execute fundraising campaigns. The company serves small to mid
Armilla AI
Armilla AI is a third-party AI quality assurance and warranty company that evaluates AI models for organizations deploying AI in regulated or high-stakes contexts — assessing models against EU AI Act
Campfire
Campfire is a United States-based AI-native enterprise resource planning (ERP) company — backed by Y Combinator (S23) with $38.5 million raised including a $35 million Series A led by Accel in June 20
Compare Chainguard with Competitors
Side-by-side AI visibility scores, platform breakdown, and market position.
Claim This Profile
Are you from Chainguard? Claim your profile to see full AI mention excerpts, get weekly visibility change alerts, and optimize how AI systems describe your brand.
Claim Chainguard Profile →Track AI Visibility in Real Time
Monitor how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude mention Chainguard vs competitors. Get alerts when AI recommendations shift.
Start Free Tracking →