Isovalent

Market position

Positioned as the leading company behind Cilium and eBPF. As of September 2022 Cilium was described as the de facto standard for secure and observable cloud native connectivity, selected as the default in managed Kubernetes offerings including Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Anthos and Amazon EKS Anywhere, and was the only container network interface at CNCF incubation level, with graduated status targeted for the first half of 2023.

Isovalent originated Cilium and co-maintains eBPF upstream in the Linux kernel, positioning its products at a kernel-level infrastructure layer where connectivity, firewalling, load balancing and monitoring are handled in the kernel itself rather than in hardware appliances or hypervisors, giving consistent visibility and control across underlying cloud infrastructure.

Technology

eBPF-based data plane in the Linux kernel. Cilium provides container networking (CNI), load balancing, identity-aware firewalling, transparent encryption, network and API-layer observability and sidecar-free service mesh; Tetragon provides runtime security observability and enforcement. The company co-maintains upstream eBPF code in the Linux kernel and has forked/contributed to related projects such as Microsoft's ebpf-for-windows.

Go-to-market

Direct enterprise sales of Isovalent Cilium Enterprise, supported by open source community adoption of Cilium, free hands-on labs and community programs (eBPF Summit, ebpf.io, eCHO office hours), plus distribution through partnerships with major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions such as Red Hat OpenShift and SUSE Rancher.

Platform engineering teams at large enterprises and telecommunications operators running Kubernetes in production, across verticals including finance and payments, e-commerce and retail, insurance, telecommunications, government, data analytics and entertainment. Named users include Adobe, Bell Canada, Capital One, Datadog, Palantir, IKEA and Sky.

Geography

Headquartered in Mountain View, California at the time of its 2022 Series B; acquired by San Jose, California-based Cisco.

History

Isovalent was founded in 2017 by the creators of Cilium. In September 2022 it announced a $40 million Series B led by Thomvest Ventures, with M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund) and Grafana Labs joining existing strategic investors Google and Cisco. Cisco announced its intent to acquire Isovalent in December 2023 and completed the acquisition on April 12, 2024, with the Isovalent team joining Cisco's Security Business Group under Jeetu Patel.

Risks & controversies

Cisco's forward-looking statements cited risks including uncertainty about the acquisition's impact on Isovalent's business, retention of Isovalent employees, and Cisco's ability to successfully integrate the company and realize expected benefits. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed; CRN reported that The Information said Cisco paid $650 million in cash.