Z5 Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures, and Samsung Next join our team and fuel our vision of delivering Kubernetes security and automation for DevSecOps teams.

Nirmata was founded on a simple idea; applications must be decoupled from infrastructure and DevSecOps teams should be able to securely operate applications at scale with ease and without lock-in concerns.

Kubernetes emerged from the container ecosystem and has rapidly become the standard cloud-agnostic way of defining, deploying, and operating applications. While Kubernetes itself will become “boring” and part of the infrastructure, several challenges remain to be solved in the operations and management of Kubernetes clusters and workloads. 

These “Day 2” concerns remain a major obstacle in the successful adoption and growth of Kubernetes by enterprises, and these challenging problems are what we are focused on solving at Nirmata.

“I’m not concerned with noise because I’m playing the long game.” — Jay-Z

Day 2 Kubernetes

In the IT space, Day 0 typically refers to the planning phase of a system, Day 1 is the initial provisioning, and Day 2 is the ongoing operations and management of the system. 

Savvy technology teams realize that Day 2 planning is necessary upfront, and that Day 2 is the most challenging phase of any system lifecycle. While Nirmata provides flexible Cluster API (CAPI) based provisioning and deep integrations with managed Kubernetes services like Amazon EKS,  our core focus is to address critical  Day 2 Kubernetes pain points for enterprise DevSecOps teams. 

While working with early Kubernetes adopters, a common challenge we noticed was coordinating activities and managing separations of concerns across development, operations, and security roles in an organization.  A single Kubernetes resource manifest may require expertise and inputs from multiple roles, which becomes a barrier to self-service and automation. In other domains, this challenge is solved by policy engines where a policy serves as a digital contract across roles. 

We built a Kubernetes policy engine to solve this problem. Beyond policy enforcement, the engine was designed to automate the generation of configurations based on flexible triggers, enabling new powerful use cases. We followed the Kubernetes open-source journey and donated the technology to CNCF in late 2020. Kyverno, which means “govern” in Greek, is now a CNCF sandbox project. Since then, Kyverno has reached over 1.2K Github stars and has a thriving community of over 50 contributors across 20 companies and organizations.

Our New Investors

We are careful in hiring, and even more so in selecting our investors. Today, we are taking the next big step towards our mission with the help of Z5 Capital. When we first met with Arun and Nanda at Z5 Capital we were not looking for funding. As our conversations progressed, it became clear that their approach was different and they had the expertise to help us scale the business, and that the timing was right.  

The funding round was led by Arun Ramamoorthy from Z5 Capital, with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures,  Samsung Next, and notable angel investors like BV Jagdeesh and Saqib Syed. 

We are delighted to have the brightest minds with the experience of building open-source communities and scaling businesses with product-led growth strategies join our team. 

What’s next

Software powers our world and we believe that the majority of business-critical enterprise applications will run on Kubernetes. In addition to managing containerized applications, Kubernetes is also becoming the universal control plane for infrastructure, cloud, and edge services. 

Our goal is clear; to build the best solution to address the Day 2 Kubernetes problem. This builds on Kyverno, the CNCF policy engine natively built for Kubernetes. With 6 million downloads and counting, we are super excited about the next hyper-growth of our journey.   Get involved, join our growing community via Kyverno slack channel or you can explore Nirmata now. For any outstanding questions, reach us here via our simple form.

Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/mgfcRci18So