Nirmata, creators of Kyverno, a policy engine designed for Kubernetes, announced that it has raised $4.0 million in pre-series A funding to further accelerate the growth of Kyverno. The investment was led by Z5 Capital with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures, Samsung Next, Benhamou Global Ventures, and angel investors Saqib Syed and BV Jagadeesh.
Pre-series A funding
The company states that the funding comes after an exceptional year for Nirmata and comes as Kyverno achieved considerable growth caused by the increased popularity of adopting open-source. Since the beginning of this year, Kyverno’s adoption quickly rose to over six million downloads. With the funding, the company aims to scale its product and operations to support the Kyverno community and establish an engineering team in India. Some of the key milestones are:
- Accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project in November 2020
- More than 6 million downloads in less than six months
- More than 1,200 GitHub stars

Jim Bugwadia, Chief Executive Officer of Nirmata said,
“Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility in the way that workloads are deployed. Yet developers may not know 80% of what needs to be configured, nor should they. Kyverno gives users the ability to focus on what matters, their workloads and applications, by aiding the adoption of Kubernetes policies rather than requiring users to learn and adopt new ones. We’re at the cutting edge of this innovation and are thrilled to be working with our partners at Z5 Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, Samsung Next and BV Jagadeesh, Saqib Syed to accelerate the execution of our vision.”