Tigera

Tigera created and maintains Project Calico, an open-source networking and network-policy engine for containers, Kubernetes, and bare-metal workloads that has become the default or optional CNI (container network interface) across every major managed Kubernetes service, including those from AWS, Microsoft, and Google. On top of that open-source base, Tigera sells a commercial platform, Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise, that adds network security policy enforcement, intrusion detection, and observability purpose-built for containerized and cloud-native workloads, using an eBPF-based data plane rather than traditional perimeter network security tooling retrofitted onto Kubernetes.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, Tigera has grown to roughly 130 employees and raised a $30 million Series B in December 2018 led by Insight Partners. The scale of open-source Calico adoption — reportedly powering more than a million clusters globally — gives Tigera a distribution advantage most cloud-native security vendors don’t have: enterprises already running Calico for basic networking are a natural upgrade path to the paid security and observability tier. Tigera has continued extending Calico’s scope, including recent work applying its network-policy model to securing AI and machine-learning workloads running on Kubernetes.

For CISOs, Tigera is relevant wherever Kubernetes is a meaningful part of the infrastructure footprint: it addresses the specific problem that traditional network security tools generally cannot see or enforce policy inside a Kubernetes cluster at the pod level, a gap that grows as more workloads move to containers.