Red Hat on Thursday snapped up container and Kubernetes security startup StackRox, a deal that speeds up its ambitions in the enterprise cloud market.
Financial terms of the deal were not announced.
StackRox, based in Mountain View, Calif., raised about $65 million from a range of investors, including Menlo Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures.
The company is considered an innovator in powerful Kubernetes-native security capabilities and the deal will bring a strong technology and personnel base to drive IBM-owned Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform.
The open-source Red Hat, which provides enterprise Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies, is already a major player with its Red Hat OpenShift platform.
StackRox has developed a Kubernetes-native container security platform designed to help both security and DevOps teams enforce security and compliance policies. The platform can be integrated with existing tools. The company says it achieved a revenue growth of over 240% in the first half of 2020.
Kubernetes, one of the fastest growing open source projects, is the foundation of cloud-native applications.
“Container security is Linux security,” Red Hat said in a statement announcing the StackRox transaction. “With this acquisition, Red Hat will further expand its security leadership, adding StackRox’s complementary capabilities to strengthen integrated security across its open hybrid cloud portfolio with greater simplicity and consistency,” the company said.
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“With StackRox, Red Hat will focus on transforming how cloud-native workloads are secured by expanding and refining Kubernetes’ native controls, as well as shifting security left into the container build and CI/CD phase, to provide a cohesive solution for enhanced security up and down the entire IT stack and throughout the lifecycle.”
Founded in 2014, StackRox shifted its focus over the past two years to focus on Kubernetes security. The StackRox software provides visibility across all Kubernetes clusters, by directly deploying components for enforcement and deep data collection into the Kubernetes cluster infrastructure, reducing the time and effort needed to implement security, and streamlining security analysis, investigation and remediation.
In addition to Red Hat OpenShift, the companies reiterated that StackRox would continue to support multiple Kubernetes platforms, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Red Hat said it plans to open source StackRox’s technology at a later date and will continue to support the KubeLinter community as well as new communities as Red Hat works to open source StackRox’s offerings.
IBM acquired Red Hat in July 2019 for $34 billlion in cash to bolster its position in the cloud services market.
Related: Container Security Firm Twistlock Raises $33 Million