Chainguard named Gartner leader in software supply security

Chainguard has been named a Leader in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant for Software Supply Chain Security and was placed furthest right for Completeness of Vision among the vendors assessed.

The recognition puts the software supply chain security specialist in a leading position in a new market category focused on protecting software components, build systems and delivery pipelines from attack.

Software supply chain security has become a growing concern as attackers target open source packages, developer tools and CI/CD systems upstream of production applications. The issue has taken on added urgency as AI-assisted coding tools increase the speed at which code is created and, in some cases, the pace at which vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited.

Chainguard's approach centres on rebuilding open source components from verified source code in isolated environments rather than scanning finished artefacts after they have entered development workflows. Its platform now spans more than 2,500 container projects, millions of language library versions, virtual machines, CI/CD workflows, agent skills and operating system packages.

At the core of the system is Chainguard Factory, which has processed more than 1 billion unique build manifests. According to the company, this allows it to scale across tens of thousands of packages and address common vulnerabilities and exposures within hours rather than days.

Broader threat

The software supply chain has become a critical security battleground because a compromise in a widely used dependency or build tool can spread across many organisations at once. Rather than breaching one company directly, attackers can exploit trust in upstream code, packages or automation tools used to build and deploy software.

That has pushed vendors and customers to look beyond traditional vulnerability scanning tools. In this market, prevention and provenance are becoming as important as detection, as buyers seek stronger assurance about where software originated, how it was built and whether it has been altered.

Chainguard says its libraries are designed to resist malware, its container images are shipped with zero known CVEs, and its actions and agent skills apply hardening rules to assess the security posture of AI and CI/CD artefacts. Its artefacts also include cryptographic signatures, signed software bills of materials and provenance aligned with SLSA L3.

The company argues that reducing known vulnerabilities before software reaches customer pipelines can cut the volume of security alerts that engineering and security teams need to triage. That is increasingly relevant for large organisations dealing with alert fatigue and patching open source dependencies spread across multiple teams and products.

Executive view

Patrick Donahue, Senior Vice President of Product at Chainguard, linked the market shift to the speed of emerging attacks.

"The software supply chain threat landscape is changing faster than traditional security tools were designed to handle. AI is only widening that gap, giving attackers new ways to find and exploit vulnerabilities before most teams even know they exist. We believe the Gartner recognition of Software Supply Chain Security as a category is a critical step in helping organisations understand the threat they're up against, and what it takes to stay ahead of it," said Patrick Donahue, Senior Vice President of Product at Chainguard.

Chainguard's customer list includes Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap and Snowflake, indicating its products are used by large enterprises and technology groups with complex software supply chains.

Regulatory pressure is also shaping the market. Businesses in highly regulated sectors or serving public sector customers face tougher expectations around software provenance, disclosure and patch management under frameworks such as FedRAMP, the NIS2 Directive and the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Those requirements are helping turn software supply chain security from a specialist concern into a board-level issue, particularly as companies rely more heavily on open source components and automated development systems. Vendors that can show a direct link between secure software production and compliance evidence are likely to attract more attention from procurement teams.

Donahue set out Chainguard's position on how that should be addressed.

"Chainguard builds your supply chain from the ground up, with trusted source, hardened artifacts, secured pipelines, and clean provenance by default. Prevention is the only viable strategy for this new AI era, and Chainguard was built for this moment," said Donahue.