AccuKnox

AccuKnox is an enterprise-grade Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) in the cloud security category, offering a free open-source runtime layer via KubeArmor and custom-priced enterprise plans that typically start around $15,000–$25,000 per year for mid-size deployments, scaling with workload count and modules selected. Built on open-source foundations including KubeArmor — a CNCF Sandbox project with over 1,300 GitHub stars and more than 130 contributors — AccuKnox delivers unified protection for cloud workloads, containers, Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines, APIs, and emerging AI/LLM assets. The platform combines runtime security, posture management, and threat intelligence into a single console, eliminating the need for organizations to stitch together multiple point solutions.

The platform's core differentiator lies in its inline runtime security capabilities powered by eBPF and Linux Security Modules (LSM), which allow it to prevent threats at execution time rather than merely detecting them after the fact. This represents a fundamental shift from traditional detection-and-response models to true preventative security. AccuKnox covers all five pillars of CNAPP: Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), along with extended capabilities for ASPM, DSPM, and AI-SPM.

AccuKnox was incubated at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) and has raised approximately $19 million in funding, including a $5.1 million seed round. The company employs roughly 100–150 staff and serves enterprises across regulated industries including financial services, government, defense, healthcare, and telecommunications. The platform supports deployment across major public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI), private clouds, on-premises infrastructure, edge environments, and air-gapped/SaaS-restricted deployments — making it particularly attractive for organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements. It integrates with over 70 security and DevOps tools, supports compliance frameworks including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, NIST, MITRE ATT&CK, CIS Benchmarks, and FedRAMP, and offers a unified policy engine that works consistently across hybrid environments.

A key strength is AccuKnox's focus on AI/LLM security through its AI-SPM module, which addresses emerging risks around model poisoning, prompt injection, data leakage from generative AI workloads, and shadow AI usage. KubeArmor itself has been downloaded over 3 million times across container registries, reflecting significant community adoption of the underlying runtime engine. The commercial platform layers enterprise analytics, multi-cloud posture management, and a unified console on top of these open-source foundations, targeting organizations managing hundreds to thousands of cloud workloads across hybrid environments.