December 21, 2023 at 03:27PM
Cisco announced the acquisition of Silicon Valley startup Isovalent to bolster its cloud security product portfolio, without disclosing financial terms. Isovalent, which raised $70 million in venture capital, specializes in eBPF open source technology and cloud native solutions for networking and security. The acquisition adds Cilium and Tetragon products to Cisco’s offerings.
From the meeting notes, it is evident that Cisco has announced plans to acquire Isovalent, a Silicon Valley networking and security startup, in order to enhance its cloud security product portfolio. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Isovalent, headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., had previously raised approximately $70 million in venture capital funding from notable investors including M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Google, Andreessen Horowitz, and Mango Capital.
The acquisition of Isovalent is part of Cisco’s recent string of strategic acquisitions, including identity threat detection technology firm Oort, AI-powered email security firm Armorblox, cloud security posture management startup Lightspin, and cloud network security play Valtix.
Isovalent’s expertise in open source technology eBPF has led to the development of Cilium, a cloud-native solution for networking and security. Cilium promises visibility into the inner workings of the operating system and offers networking capabilities and visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud-native applications, enabling policy definition of software-defined networks.
Additionally, the planned acquisition includes the addition of Cilium Mesh to facilitate the connection of Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds, and Tetragon, an eBPF-based open source security tool that provides visibility into and enforces runtime behavior within an application and on the network.