Venafi flies off with UK-based Kubernetes startup

Security vendor acquires London-based Jetstack to bolster machine identity protection capabilities

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Cybersecurity vendor Venafi is set to acquire London-based Kubernetes security specialist Jetstack.

Jetstack was founded five years ago and specialises in open source machine identity protection software for Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystems.

The acquisition comes hot on the heels of VMware's acquisition of another Kubernetes security outfit, Octarine.

"In the race to virtualise everything, businesses need faster application innovation and better security; both are mandatory," said Jeff Hudson, Venafi CEO.

"Most people see these requirements as opposing forces, but we don't. We see a massive opportunity for innovation.

"This acquisition brings together two leaders who are already working together to accelerate the development process while simultaneously securing applications against attack, and there's a lot more to do. Our mutual customers are urgently asking for more help to solve this problem because they know that speed wins, as long as you don't crash."

Jetstack's most popular open source software is cert-manager, which allows developers to quickly create, connect and consume certificates with Kubernetes and cloud native tools.

The two firms have been working together for the past two years on creating next generation machine identity protection in Kubernetes, as well as in the multi-cloud, service mesh and microservices ecosystems.

Matt Bates, CTO and co-founder of Jetstack, said: "We developed cert-manager to make it easy for developers to scale Kubernetes with consistent, secure and declared-as-code machine identity protection.

"The project has been a huge hit with the community and has been adopted far beyond our expectations. Our team is thrilled to join Venafi so we can accelerate our plans to bring machine identity protection to the cloud native stack, grow the community and contribute to a wider range of projects across the ecosystem."