Chainguard, founded in 2021, focuses on securing the software supply chain for engineering teams. The company builds secure-by-default container images, libraries, and virtual machines, aiming to eliminate common vulnerabilities at the source rather than through downstream patching. Its founders previously built foundational open source projects at Google, including Kubernetes, Sigstore, and Distroless.
The company's primary offering, Chainguard Images, is described as the largest catalog of minimal, zero-CVE container images. These are designed to be secure from the outset, reducing the security burden on development teams. The underlying Chainguard Factory is a system that continuously builds and updates thousands of these secure artifacts.
Chainguard operates in the technical domains of open source software, software supply chain security, and container security. Its approach targets a significant reduction in engineering toil, with a cited metric of eliminating an estimated 1,000 hours of security-related work per customer annually. The company describes itself as mission-driven to be a safe source for open source software.
