RapidFort: Why We Invested

This week, RapidFort announced its $42M Series A. We’re excited to co-lead this investment in one of the fastest growing security companies today, and partner with Mehran, Rajeev, Russ, George, and the entire RapidFort team as they advance a transformative approach to securing the modern software supply chain.

Enterprises Need Vulnerability Management, Not Just Visibility

Enterprises are shipping code faster than ever, increasingly on top of open-source software and containerized infrastructure. At the same time, security teams are being asked to meet stricter regulatory requirements (FedRAMP, CMMC, SBOM mandates), often on compressed timelines of just weeks or days. For most modern enterprises, manual vulnerability management is impractical and extremely expensive.

In our conversations with CISOs and security practitioners, we consistently hear the same message: security teams don’t want yet another solution that simply identifies problems. They need technology that removes vulnerabilities at scale.

A Practical Product with Technical Differentiation

RapidFort directly addresses the shift to scalable vulnerability management with a pragmatic software supply chain security platform.

We love capital-efficient founders who can clearly articulate practical differentiation. That’s precisely what the RapidFort team has demonstrated.

Many vulnerability management platforms require enterprises to migrate to a proprietary Linux distribution and package ecosystem. While this can sound appealing on paper, it introduces excessive friction in real-world environments due to new operating systems, alternate package managers, application updates, additional developer burden, and increased compatibility risk for existing workloads.

Instead of forcing migration, RapidFort delivers binary-compatible, hardened images that drop into existing environments with minimal disruption. This design choice matters enormously: developers don’t have to modify existing applications, security teams get immediate CVE reduction, and compliance teams get audit-ready artifacts.

Exceptional Go-to-Market Traction

In a market where enterprise security sales cycles are often measured in quarters or years, RapidFort has demonstrated exceptionally fast sales cycles, high win rates against incumbents, strong inbound demand from regulated enterprises, and near-100% renewals. Today, RapidFort is the leading provider of curated, hardened container images, and we believe the company’s long-term opportunity is much broader as they expand into first-party application hardening, runtime visibility, and platform tooling.

Defining the Future of Software Supply Chain Security

At Forgepoint, our investment thesis has always been to back transformative companies addressing the most pressing challenges at the convergence of cybersecurity, AI, and infrastructure software. The RapidFort team is a formidable, world-class group with deep experience building and scaling security platforms. They are successfully helping enterprises secure software supply chain vulnerabilities, a primary attack vector. Forgepoint Capital looks forward to supporting RapidFort as they define the next generation of software supply chain security.

Pictured (from left to right): Mehran, Rami, Rajeev, George, Jimmy, Ben, Russ, and Ernie