About

Empowering container security from secure networking to comprehensive protection

Who we are

Tigera provides secure networking and comprehensive protection for containers and Kubernetes, and is the creator and maintainer of Calico Open Source, the most widely used container networking and security solution. Our solutions are used by leading companies, including Discover, Chipotle, NBCUniversal, HanseMerkur, Box, Siemens Healthineers, Playtech, Royal Bank of Canada, and Bell Canada.

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Mission & Values

We prevent, detect, and mitigate security breaches in cloud-native applications

At Tigera, we have four core values:

Our customer is the hero of our story

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The purpose of our business is to make our customers successful. We strive for a deep understanding of our customer’s business problem and what success looks like from their point of view by listening with deep humility. Our job doesn’t end when we sell them a product – it begins at that point. We will do everything in our power to help them realize value from our product. We will find our own success through this mindset and derive joy from delighting customers.

We aim high and are nimble in how we get there

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We set lofty goals based on where we aspire to be and then stretch our thinking to achieve them. We derive joy from bringing these ideas to life by using our creativity and autonomy to solve hard problems. We believe that excellence is defined by building early momentum while learning and adapting rapidly at each step of the journey. Using this nimble approach, we will derive the fundamentals that are necessary to design for scale.

Our success relies on continuous learning

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We love to learn, create and build. We experience a state of Flow when engaged in these pursuits while gaining mastery over our craft. We are fearless in jumping into new areas and learning. We are trailblazers and take risks, and accept that failure is part of the learning process. We bring a beginners mind-set to every project and our goal is to discover our unique approach to solving problems through rapid iterative experimentation and learning.

We respect, support, and collaborate with each other

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We believe that building a great and enduring business is a team sport. We believe that the output from a team with diverse and different views and backgrounds is far greater than possible from any individual. We succeed as a team by respecting each other with open minds and compassion while leveraging each other’s strengths. We derive joy from the magical energy unleashed from working for a cause bigger than our ego and from a sense of deep connection with teammates.

These values lie at the heart of everything we do, and have enabled us to create best-in-class products tailored to user needs, that grow and evolve alongside changing technologies.

Our story: From Project Calico to Calico Cloud

Tigera’s story begins 6 years ago with Project Calico, an open-source networking and security project with an active development and user community. Calico Open Source was born out of this project and has grown to be the most widely adopted solution for networking and security for containers and Kubernetes, powering 8M+ nodes daily across 166 countries.

As adoption of containers and Kubernetes grew and organizations started using Kubernetes at scale, they began to encounter more advanced requirements for observability and security. Tigera responded to this need by building upon Calico Open Source to create the industry’s only active security platform with full-stack observability, available as a fully managed SaaS (Calico Cloud) or a self-managed service (Calico Enterprise).

Tigera was founded by the original Project Calico engineering team. We are committed to maintaining Calico Open Source as the leading standard for container and Kuberentes networking and security, while also offering Kubernetes-native, full-stack security and observability capabilities to commercial users looking for a pay-as-you-go, managed cloud service or a self-managed, on-premises platform.

Awards & analyst mentions

Leadership

Executive Team

Ratan Tipirneni

Ratan Tipirneni

President & CEO

Ratan is responsible for defining strategy, execution and scaling revenues at Tigera. He is an entrepreneurial executive with extensive experience incubating, building and scaling software businesses from early stage to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. He is also a proven leader with a track record of building world-class teams.

Ratan founded and built two SaaS companies, IPTouch and PersonalMD.com. He has also held senior level positions at Actifio, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and SupportSoft. He has an MBA from Santa Clara University, an MS in Computer Science from Louisiana State University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Osmania University.

Mark Elchinoff

Mark Elchinoff

Chief Financial Officer

Mark brings over 30 years of financial and operational expertise as Chief Financial Officer of Tigera. Mark’s extensive leadership experience includes holding the position of Chief Financial Officer at technology companies including NGINX, Mercadao Software, Match.com, and nCircle Network Security

Utpal Bhatt

Utpal Bhatt

Chief Marketing Officer

As Chief Marketing Officer for Tigera, Utpal is responsible for overall marketing strategy and execution, Utpal brings 20+ years of Marketing and Product Management leadership experience at high-growth start-ups and large companies. Before Tigera, Utpal led marketing at Qubole, helping to scale the company and build a marketing team prior to their acquisition by Idera. Prior to Qubole, Utpal was the Vice President of Marketing at Neo4j where he was instrumental in catapulting Graph Database as the fastest growing database category, driving significant technology adoption and revenue growth. Utpal has a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Physics from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (India) and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

Amit Gupta

Amit Gupta

Chief Product Officer

Amit is responsible for the strategy and vision of Tigera’s products and leading the delivery of our roadmap. He is a hands-on product executive with deep expertise building software products and services across various domains including cloud security, cloud native applications, public and private cloud infrastructure.

Amit was most recently VP of Product at CloudPassage where he led the evolution of CloudPassage to one of the most comprehensive cloud security solutions for both cloud native applications and legacy environments. Prior to CloudPassage, Amit has had various product leadership roles at VMware, Cisco, Ensim (acquired by Ingram Micro). He has an MBA from Haas School of Business and B. Tech in Mech. Engineering from IIT Kanpur.

Fahad Rizqi

Fahad Rizqi

Chief Revenue Officer

Fahad is responsible for revenue generation and expansion within our growing accounts. He has experience building sales teams from the ground up as well as scaling those organizations.

Most recently Fahad held sales leadership roles at Centrify where he was the VP of Sales for Central and Western US and had built a global sales team for the cloud business. Prior to Centrify Fahad held various sales leadership roles at companies including Tripwire, nCircle, Datacom Systems, and FireEye. Fahad has an MBA from the University of California, Davis and a BSC in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma.

Pervez Sikora

Pervez Sikora

Chief Customer Officer

Pervez Sikora has over 25 years of operations, customer support, professional services and engineering experience. This has given Pervez a diverse background that includes entrepreneurship, operations leadership, software engineering and technology management. As Vice President, Services and Customer Success at Tigera, Pervez is responsible for the delivery of professional services and technical support to Tigera’s customers around the world.

Prior to Tigera, Pervez was the Senior Vice President, Global Services and Customer Success at Actifio. Prior to Actifio, Pervez was the Chief Information Officer at Impremedia, where he led the successful migration of over 90% of the technology infrastructure to the cloud. Before Impremedia, Pervez was the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ad2Pro Media Solutions, one of the world’s largest providers of offshore marketing and advertising design services to global media and retail companies.

Pervez holds a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California and a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Osmania University.

Board of Directors

Ratan Tipirneni

Ratan Tipirneni

Ratan is responsible for defining strategy, execution and scaling revenues at Tigera. He is an entrepreneurial executive with extensive experience incubating, building and scaling software businesses from early stage to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. He is also a proven leader with a track record of building world-class teams.

Ratan founded and built two SaaS companies, IPTouch and PersonalMD.com. He has also held senior level positions at Actifio, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and SupportSoft. He has an MBA from Santa Clara University, an MS in Computer Science from Louisiana State University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Osmania University.

Soma Somasegar

Soma Somasegar

Soma joined Madrona in November 2015 and is a Managing Director at Madrona. Prior to Madrona, Soma had a successful twenty-seven year career at Microsoft Corporation including being the Senior Vice President of the Developer Division. Soma has long been an angel investor with investments across a wide range of technology areas both in the U.S. and internationally. At Madrona, he is focusing on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Applications, developer centric next-generation cloud platforms and tools, and the emergence of new technologies such as VR/AR. He has authored several pieces outlining Madrona’s thinking about how these technologies will evolve.

Forest Baskett

Forest Baskett

Forest Baskett has been with NEA since 1999 and is currently a Special Partner focused on technology investing. He holds board positions at several private companies. Some of his investments that became public companies are Atheros Communications, Audience, Data Domain, Fusionio and Tableau Software. Prior to NEA, Forest was Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. Before joining SGI, he founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation. He began his career as a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. Dr. Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Aaron Jacobson

Aaron Jacobson

Aaron Jacobson joined NEA in 2011 and is a Partner focused on investing in entrepreneurs seeking to build, scale and secure the next-generation of SaaS applications, big data platforms, and cloud infrastructure. He serves on the board of Tigera and illusive networks, and is an observer at NGINX, Streamsets, Move Guides, Mimosa Networks, Juvo, and Built Robotics. He has also worked closely with many other NEA portfolio companies including Box (NYSE:Box), Databricks, MapR, UnifyID, Bloom Energy, and Coursera.  In 2016 he was named to Forbes Magazine’s “30 under 30” in Venture Capital and the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 Under 40”.

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