Valarian

Valarian, founded in 2020 and headquartered in London, builds secure infrastructure for organisations operating in high-trust, high-stakes environments. Its platform, ACRA, is a secure, compartmentalised backbone for running and protecting mission-critical applications: it transforms Kubernetes into a hardened, governed environment and applies policy defined once and enforced everywhere to each workload, whether agent, model or service.

The technical stack behind ACRA is layered and specific. Per-workload policy spans seven layers: cryptographic workload identity (SPIFFE/SPIRE), user identity, default-deny network isolation (Cilium + Istio), admission and workload policy enforcement (Kyverno and gateways), short-lived scoped secrets (Vault), per-workload messaging permissions (NATS), and audit and evidence. Alongside Kubernetes hardening and governance, the company's domains include AI system security and governance, cloud infrastructure security, and deployment in cloud, on-premise and air-gapped environments.

Valarian reports hundreds of enclaves deployed across four continents and $70 million in funding raised to date, with investors including NEA, Scout Ventures and IQ Capital. Its work spans government, defence, national security, enterprise, and AI and emerging technology. The team draws on backgrounds from US Special Operations, Palantir and Darktrace, and the company describes security and operational reliability as non-negotiable, with a focus on control, integrity and governance of sensitive data and systems.