Deepfence

Deepfence’s core offering is a two-tier cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). ThreatMapper, released under Apache 2.0 as open source, scans containers, Kubernetes, serverless functions, and VMs across multi-cloud environments for vulnerabilities, malware, exposed secrets, and compliance misconfigurations, then ranks findings by actual exploitability rather than raw CVE severity. ThreatStryker, the commercial layer built on top, adds runtime protection using cloud-native deep packet inspection to detect and automatically neutralize active attacks in production, rather than just flagging findings for a team to remediate manually.

Founded by Sandeep Lahane (reported founding years vary across sources, generally cited between 2015 and 2017) and based in the Milpitas/Palo Alto area of California with an engineering presence in Bangalore, India, Deepfence raised a $9.5M Series A in November 2020 led by AllegisCyber with participation from Sonae IM and Chiratae Ventures, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly $10.5M. In 2022 the company launched Deepfence Cloud, a fully managed SaaS version of its observability platform, and in August 2023 it released expanded ThreatStryker runtime-neutralization capabilities.

Leading with a genuinely open-source scanner (ThreatMapper) to drive adoption before upselling into the commercial runtime-protection tier is a distinct go-to-market approach in a CNAPP market where most competitors, including much larger platform vendors, ship closed commercial products from the start. That open-core strategy has helped Deepfence build community visibility, but its modest disclosed funding relative to CNAPP category leaders means it operates at meaningfully smaller scale than the incumbents CISOs are most likely to also be evaluating.