Seated at his desk in his Rhode Island home, Dan Lorenc is surrounded by things he’s built.

On the wall, there are hats—baseball caps, flat caps, and a bucket hat with Linky the Octopus, the mascot for Chainguard, the company he cofounded and now leads as CEO. In the corner of the room, two 3-D printers hum frequently. Lorenc’s hat hooks come from those printers, along with a whole lot else. Though you can’t see them in his Zoom shot, Lorenc’s printed creations never seem far from arm’s reach.

Lorenc is a builder and gift-giver. He 3-D prints signs with sayings that he shares with his employees and investors. One reads: Keep The Main Thing The Main Thing. Another: Feedback Is A Gift. While still a software engineer at Google in the early days of the pandemic, others bought desks with their work-from-home stipends, while Lorenc used his to build one.

The son of a roofer, Lorenc grew up in Albany, N.Y., working with his father patching house roofs and building cars for stock car racing.

“My dad, grandpa, and I would take cars out of the junkyard, basically fix them up,” he recalls. “The car couldn’t cost more than $300—anybody could come up, offer to buy your car for $300, and you had to sell it to them. That’s how they enforced it.”

After working the better part of a decade at Google, Lorenc switched race cars to set out on his own, and has done something rare: He’s the cofounder and CEO of a unicorn that’s on a growth tear, but isn’t built on AI hype. He’s a study in contrasts that link together—a mechanical engineer by training with a tactile relationship to the world around him, building increasingly ubiquitous security software that most people will never see, running a company with no physical office at all.

“My contrarian take here is that remote-only is actually easy,” said Lorenc. “I don’t think that’s hard. What makes it hard is the growth. Humans do need face-to-face contact, that relationship-building. But you don’t need it every day.”

Nearly nine months ago, the company announced its Series C in Term Sheet, and now they’re back: Chainguard has closed a $356 million Series D, led by Kleiner Perkins and IVP. With the Series D, Salesforce Ventures and Datadog Ventures have become new investors, while existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, Amplify, Redpoint, Lightspeed, and Mantis VC, also participated.

This brings the company’s valuation to $3.5 billion, a massive leap from the $1.12 billion it fetched over the summer. Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid is clear-eyed about the ambition it represents.

“The cutoff for top ten software acquisitions of all-time is $3 billion,” said Hamid. “You have to become one of the great public software companies for this to be a great win for us, and we believe that’s certainly the case here. I think they’re going the distance.”

Part of that investor confidence stems from the gravitational pull Chainguard has for customers. Consider its annual recurring revenue, or ARR—a much-watched metric that reflects stable, contract and subscription-based income. Over fiscal year 2025, Chainguard grew its ARR sevenfold, reaching $40 million. By the end of fiscal 2026, it expects to more than double that figure, hitting $100 million, the startup exclusively told Fortune.

Today, the company counts over 150 customers, including Canva, HPE, and GitLab. The public sector has also proven to be a strong growth area. And unlike most security vendors, Chainguard doesn’t primarily sell to CISOs. Instead, its buyers are the engineering teams actually building and maintaining open source software.

“We have Series A startups to Fortune 500 companies as our customers,” said Chainguard president Ryan Carlson, who joined the company in 2023. “Our customer could be anybody building and maintaining open source.”

Lorenc’s decision to hire Carlson—previously of Wiz—is a testament to his confident leadership, said IVP general partner Tom Loverro. And, in a way, it ties back to the same creativity behind his ever-growing hat collection and 3-D printed gifts.

“It’s a sign of his self-confidence and security,” Loverro told Fortune. “Insecure CEOs make bad decisions. But CEOs who feel very secure hire well, and entrust their leaders to make decisions without undermining them. And so as silly as the hats may seem, when you pair that confidence and creativity with good execution, it becomes something even more powerful.”

Loverro and IVP have doubled down on Chainguard after leading the summer Series C: “The level of technical challenge to get this right for enterprises is kind of mind-blowing,” Loverro said. “It’s a very difficult problem to solve.”

And like any difficult security problem, it has real stakes. Kim Lewandowski—who with Lorenc and Matthew Moore and Ville Aikas cofounded Chainguard in 2021—frames it with a metaphor: You wouldn’t eat a bagged salad or take a pharmaceutical pill from an unverified source. You’d want to know exactly what’s in it, and where it came from. Software, she says, should be no different.

“It’s really about having that trusted source for something so important in day-to-day life,” said Lewandowski. “Developers are really just pulling stuff off the Internet and running it, and there are real lives at stake. Some of these ransomware attacks can even take down 911 systems, because everything is software.”

Despite the serious nature of his business, Lorenc isn’t one to take himself too seriously—an ethos that extends to Chainguard as a whole. A Chipotle enthusiast who owns at least one corduroy suit, Lorenc has included a “burrito bowl provision” in documents, according to Carlson. And, of course, there are all the hats and their 3-D printed hooks.

It might seem unserious for a billion-dollar company, but I think that’s by design. Because the danger of taking everything seriously is that you take nothing seriously, in the process dulling creative edges. The off-kilter humor is more than just a novelty—it has a purpose. Paradoxically, it’s a way to stay focused.

It’s how you keep the main thing the main thing.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS

- Nourish, a New York City-based nutrition counseling services provider, raised $70 million in Series B funding. J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners led the round and was joined by Thrive Capital, Index Ventures, Y Combinator, and others.

- Sentra, a New York City-based cloud-native data security platform, raised $50 million in Series B funding. Key1 Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, Zeev Ventures, Standard Investments, and Munich Re Ventures.

- Northwood, an El Segundo, Calif.-based satellite ground station developer, raised $30 million in Series A funding. Alpine Space Ventures and a16z led the round and were joined by lso Capital, Founders Fund, and Stepstone.

- Salsa, a New York City-based embedded payroll provider, raised $20 million in Series A funding. Altos Ventures led the round and was joined by Greycroft, SemperVirens, Definition, and Better Tomorrow Ventures.

- Uniqus Consultech, a San Jose-based consulting platform, raised $20 million in Series C funding. Nexus Venture Partners led the round and was joined by Sorin Investments.

- Miggo Security, a New York City-based application detection and response solutions provider, raised $17 million in Series A funding. SYN Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investor YL Ventures.

- Ascertain, a New York City-based AI-powered case management assistant for healthcare, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Deerfield Management led the round and was joined by Northwell Health.

- Recce, a San Francisco-based code review solution for data teams, raised $4 million in funding. Heavybit led and was joined by Vertex Ventures US, Hive Ventures, and angel investors.

PRIVATE EQUITY

- Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire the Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AerData, and OzRunways assets of the digital aviation solutions business from Boeing, an Arlington County, Va.-based aerospace company, for $10.6 billion in cash.

- SitelogIQ, a portfolio company of AEA Investors, acquired Path Company, a Jackson, Miss.-based energy services company for the municipal and higher education markets. Financial terms were not disclosed.

OTHER

- Socket acquired Coana, a Aarhus, Denmark-based reachability analysis platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

PEOPLE

- Andreessen Horowitz, a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm, added Erik Torenberg as a general partner. Previously, he was at Turpentine, which was acquired by a16z.

- Scale Venture Partners, a Foster City, Calif.-based venture capital firm, promoted Jonas Ciplickas to vice president and added Siddharth Ramakrishnan as a principal and Grace Patel as an associate. Previously, Ramakrishnan was at Attentive and Patel was at Adobe.

Exclusive: Chainguard secures $356 million Series D as valuation soars to $3.5 billion