Why startups need to be secure-by-default

Startups are supposed to move fast. That’s the job. Ship features, find customers, make them successful, repeat. But if you're building a technology business, there's one major unexpected hurdle to growth.

It's not fundraising. It’s not your roadmap. It's not hiring.

It’s your software supply chain.

That might sound like a problem for later. You might be thinking, “does a startup need to care about its supply chain yet?” If you want to close enterprise deals, pass procurement reviews, and maintain a clean track record in front of investors and customers, your internal infrastructure better be tighter than your pitch deck.

We’ve been helping startups do that at Chainguard since the very beginning. One of our startup customers, Cyera, said it best:

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“Building the world's leading enterprise data security solution means we need to be at the cutting edge of secure innovation. Chainguard's secure container images solution is transforming Cyera's approach to eliminating vulnerabilities, freeing up our developers' time to focus on innovation and the most pressing security priorities for our customers.”

This post is for founders, CTOs, and engineering leads trying to scale a startup the right way: fast, yes, but also secure, compliant, and sane. Let’s break down why security can no longer be a “later” problem.

Security requirements are slowing down sales

Startups live or die by sales velocity. Every day a deal doesn’t close is a day longer until revenue hits the bank, and a day closer to your next fundraising crunch.

That’s why the last thing you want is security killing deals.

Buyers aren’t just comparing features anymore. They’re looking for SBOMs, asking for SOC2 reports, and demanding answers about vulnerabilities and build processes. According to G2, 81% of buyers now factor in a vendor’s security history when evaluating software.

If you’re not ready to answer those questions, you stall out. Sometimes permanently.

And this isn’t just an enterprise problem. Even mid-market and Series A companies are adding formal security reviews before they buy. The more sensitive the data is, the more understandable and expected the lie of questioning becomes. That process adds friction unless you’ve prepped for it.

Security is no longer just an internal concern. It’s a go-to-market blocker.

The engineering stack is a liability

Ask any startup engineering team what’s slowing them down and you’ll hear the same things: alerts, patches, dependency upgrades, and toolchain inconsistencies. The work that never gets on the roadmap, but eats your team’s time and focus anyway. This isn’t just annoying, it’s creating technical debt.

In the early days, most startups glue together infrastructure from whatever is fast, cheap, and gets the job done. Container images from DockerHub. Quick-start Terraform scripts. CI/CD pipelines nobody audits. It works… until it doesn’t.

Then one day, your team gets hit with a critical CVE and spends a sprint unraveling the mess. Or your sales team gets hit with a 100-question vendor assessment, and your CTO spends a weekend trying to remember how your images were built.

Every hour spent fighting an open source dependency issue is an hour not spent on innovating on your core product. Every engineer debugging a CVE is one not shipping a feature. And if you think this scales linearly, think again.

As your product grows, your surface area grows. More code, more teams, more tools, more exposure. And without systems in place to handle that growth, your velocity tanks.

The default state of most engineering orgs is now technical debt as a service. You’re constantly firefighting downstream consequences of choices made in the name of short-term speed. The reality is that the pace of innovation is rapid enough that the “downstream future” you mortgaged in the name of short-term speed comes faster than you anticipated, and those fires tend to ignite right when you’re trying to scale.

Compliance isn’t optional anymore

Focusing on compliance used to be something startups did right before a big Series B or a first enterprise customer. Not anymore.

Increasingly, it’s a prerequisite to even get a meeting. Buyers expect controls. Investors expect maturity. Security audits are showing up in early diligence, not just late-stage term sheets.

But compliance takes time, and if you treat it like a one-time sprint, you’re going to end up with a pile of screenshots, broken workflows, and teams scared to change anything for fear of breaking the audit trail.

Compliance done poorly slows you down. Done right, it becomes a natural part of your infrastructure. But that takes planning. And most startups don’t plan; they react. By then, it’s too late.

“We’ll deal with it later” is not a strategy

I’ve seen many founders defer infrastructure investments with some version of “we’ll deal with that later.” But security isn’t a toggle you can flip on when it’s convenient.

The systems you choose in the early days become the foundation you scale on. If that foundation is fragile, duct-taped together, or invisible to your own team, you’ll pay for it: either in lost deals, expensive rework, or public breaches.

And when a breach happens, it doesn’t matter how small you are. It will follow you.

So, what should leaders do about it?

The most successful startups don’t treat security as a sunk cost; they frame it as a way to accelerate revenue. That means investing in the kinds of controls and certifications that win deals, and then making sure your sales and marketing teams are shouting about it. If you’re chasing enterprise buyers, this isn’t optional. Security posture shows up early and often in the sales process, and a mature, audit-ready infrastructure can be the difference between making the shortlist or being ruled out immediately. And with the rise of AI-connected systems, chances are high that you’re already touching sensitive data in some way. Buyers know that. Your job is to show them you’ve taken it seriously.

Internally, secure-by-default workflows shouldn’t slow your team down. They should make them faster. The best engineering organizations understand that speed and reliability aren’t at odds; they complement each other. The more your developers ship through reproducible, hardened pipelines, the less time they’ll spend chasing CVEs, debugging version mismatches, or navigating flaky CI/CD systems. Think of it as an efficiency play: teams that don’t need to worry about underlying risk move faster, and when security becomes the default path, it frees up attention for what actually matters: shipping product.

Here’s where Chainguard comes in.

We're building secure-by-default components that help startups get enterprise-ready from day one without sacrificing speed. What am I actually talking about here?

• Hardened, minimal containers and libraries you can trust.

• Continuously patched and verified artifacts that support audit requirements.

• Signed SBOMs, provenance, and build traceability built in.

• All available through a pricing model that scales with your team, not your image count.

Startups shouldn’t have to choose between moving fast and being secure. We give you both.

If you're building the future, your infrastructure should be ready for the future, too. Read our guide on building an enterprise-ready software supply chain at a startup to learn more about why this is important.