Today, I’m thrilled to announce a significant milestone for Nirmata: we’ve closed $9.6 million in funding led by Peak XV’s Surge (formerly Sequoia India and SEA) with participation from Dallas Venture Capital, Dreamit Ventures, and existing seed investors Z5 Capital and Uncorrelated Ventures. This investment validates our vision and will accelerate our mission to transform security and operations for cloud-native enterprises.

Our Journey

At Nirmata, we build software that secures and automate some of the world’s most critical systems. Cloud-native applications power our modern world. From the latest AI/ML agentic applications to the core infrastructure software deployed by utilities, financials, healthcare, and retail businesses, cloud native software packaged as containers and deployed on Kubernetes enables global systems and businesses. As a top CNCF contributor and the creators of Kyverno, we’re deeply involved in shaping this cloud-native landscape.

Our journey has been one of evolution and customer focus. We started with Kubernetes management but doubled-down on governance and compliance, after recognizing that enterprises require a composable and extensible platform assembled with best-in-class cloud native technologies, and that Policy as Code plays a critical role in the transition from manual management to automated governance. This realization led us to create and open-source Kyverno, a policy engine initially designed for Kubernetes.

Since our seed round, Kyverno’s adoption has exploded. From around 200 million downloads in mid 2022, it’s now been downloaded over 3.2 billion times and has evolved into a general-purpose policy engine applicable across the entire cloud native stack.

Policy as Code: The Game Changer

We believe Policy as Code is the future of cloud-native security and operations. Traditional security focuses on vulnerability management and runtime detection, which don’t prevent issues from arising. With the increasing complexity of cloud-native systems, Gartner predicts that by 2027 almost 99% of cloud security issues will stem from misconfigurations. Policy as Code shifts security down into the platform, preventing misconfigurations and automating security operations to reduce production issues.Policy as Code also boosts developer productivity. Over 80% of enterprises are building platform teams, and policies are essential for enabling self-service environments for developers. Cloud-native platforms leverage policies for cost-savings, or dynamic Just-In-Time (JIT) provisioning, streamlining complex workflows that previously required manual intervention and handoffs across teams.

Nirmata Control Hub

Building on Kyverno’s success, we launched Nirmata Control Hub to address the policy management and governance needs of cloud-native platform teams. Control Hub provides centralized visibility and workflows to ensure global policy enforcement, prevent local changes, manage exceptions, and troubleshoot policy failures.

While Kyverno focuses on policy enforcement, and does that extremely efficiently (~75% better than the competition), Nirmata addresses critical concerns for cloud native platform teams. For example, how do you know global policies are actually being enforced across the fleet of clusters and pipelines? How do you prevent local changes and tampering? How do you manage exceptions at scale? How do you detect and troubleshoot policy failures? 

Nirmata Control Hub is designed to solve these key problems for platform security and operations teams, and 10X their efficiency using the latest AI/ML technologies.

The Road Ahead

Just as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) evolved into a $5B+ market category, we believe Policy as Code (PaC) is poised to become a cornerstone for cloud native platform engineering teams.

At Nirmata, we’re excited to partner with leading platform engineering teams to secure, scale and optimize their cloud-native infrastructure. Our 2025 roadmap is packed with exciting new features, and we have a series of announcements planned, starting with KubeCon EU 2025.

If you’re a platform engineer, reach out to learn more about what we are building at Nirmata. And if you’re a creator, passionate about shaping the future of cloud-native, we’re always hiring! Check out our open positions – we’d love to hear from you.