Valarian

Valarian builds secure infrastructure for organisations operating in high-trust, high-stakes environments. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in London, the company has raised $70 million and counts hundreds of enclaves deployed across four continents, in cloud, on-premise and air-gapped settings. Its customers span government, defence, national security and enterprise.

At the centre of the offering is ACRA, a compartmentalised backbone for running and protecting mission-critical applications. ACRA transforms Kubernetes into a hardened, governed environment and wraps every workload - agent, model or service - in policy defined once and enforced everywhere. Its per-workload policy stack runs to seven layers: cryptographic workload identity (SPIFFE/SPIRE), user identity, default-deny network isolation (Cilium and Istio), admission and workload policy enforcement (Kyverno and gateways), short-lived scoped secrets (Vault), per-workload messaging permissions (NATS), and audit and evidence.

The engineering work sits across Kubernetes hardening and governance, cloud-native security, zero-trust networking, workload identity, policy enforcement and admission control, secrets management, messaging security, audit and compliance evidence, air-gapped and on-premise deployment, and AI systems security. Deployments reach environments where security and operational reliability are treated as non-negotiable.

The team draws on backgrounds from US Special Operations, Palantir, Darktrace and similar organisations, and the company is backed by NEA, Scout Ventures and IQ Capital.