The tech leader’s mandate: Use engineering to accelerate sales velocity

In today’s market, enterprise buyers are trusting mission-critical workloads to startups in a way they never have before, thanks to the rapid innovation and scale that comes with artificial intelligence. While that opens far more growth opportunities for young companies, it also means startups need to emulate mature enterprises to protect their customers and their own brands from any fallout from supplier security flaws. Security becomes much more than a checkbox in sales processes: it’s one of the most common impediments to sales velocity. Customer security questionnaires, vendor risk assessments, and compliance audits routinely slow deals or block startups from serious consideration altogether.

For engineering leaders, this creates a fundamental tension. Teams are under pressure to innovate quickly, ship new features, and support aggressive growth targets, yet they’re also expected to demonstrate enterprise-grade security, compliance, and operational maturity. The burden of addressing security and compliance concerns extends beyond simply balancing these requirements in product plans. When security and compliance are treated as a lower-tier requirement, there can be serious downstream consequences, such as the accumulation of technical debt, excessive amounts of engineering toil, and the downstream impact on delivering innovation.

To eliminate this tension, security must be baked into the software development lifecycle itself rather than being bolted on later. Chainguard enables this by providing secure-by-default components that embed trust and integrity into the software supply chain, allowing engineering teams to sustain innovation velocity while building products that move through enterprise sales cycles faster.

Security friction slows enterprise sales

As startups move upmarket, customer concerns about security, compliance, and operational maturity introduce new obstacles in the sales process. These enterprise-ready concerns aren’t theoretical:

• Buyers strongly prefer vendors with established compliance programs

• Security and risk reviews can stretch sales cycles by weeks—or longer

• 81% of buyers review a vendor’s security history before purchasing

Despite having strong products, many startups lose momentum in sales cycles simply because they lack the ability to quickly demonstrate the evidence enterprise buyers expect around their software supply chain, including:

• SBOMs and dependency inventories

• Provenance and build attestations

• Vulnerability management SLAs

• Compliance evidence aligned to SOC 2, ISO 27001, or NIST 800-161

When build pipelines aren’t designed to produce this by default, DevOps teams become an emergency response unit, generating artifacts retroactively, chasing CVEs, and answering repetitive questions across deals.

From an engineering standpoint, this often triggers a familiar anti-pattern: roadmap work stops while teams scramble to retroactively assemble SBOMs, explain dependency management, or respond to audit questions.

How Chainguard helps engineering teams accelerate sales velocity

Chainguard removes this friction by making security, trust, and compliance a default outcome of how software is built, not an after-the-fact exercise. Instead of “shift left” security by adding scanners and gates, Chainguard makes trusted artifacts to use as the base building blocks of pipelines. By providing secure-by-default development components and verifiable software supply chain artifacts, Chainguard enables engineering teams to build security in from the get-go and easily provide evidence that demonstrates a strong security posture to customers. Rather than scrambling, engineering teams can confidently and rapidly provide the evidence that enterprise customers demand.

For development managers and technical leaders, this approach delivers immediate, tangible benefits:

• Engineers spend less time reacting to audits and questionnaires

• Security posture is consistent across teams and services

• Compliance evidence is always available and up to date

• Feature delivery remains predictable — even during enterprise sales cycles

Security stops being a drag on engineering effectiveness and instead becomes an enabler for growth.

Engineering as a growth accelerator

High-growth startups depend on revenue at scale, and engineering teams play a central role in making that possible. Chainguard eliminates the operational drag that security typically places on both development teams and sales cycles by embedding trust and integrity directly into the software supply chain.

With Chainguard, teams can show security instead of scrambling to prove it — resulting in more trustworthy products, shorter security reviews, and faster enterprise deals. Technical leaders maintain focus on innovation while building secure, enterprise-ready software that supports growth rather than slowing it down.

Chainguard helps engineering teams build software that is easier to trust, easier to buy, and built to scale.

To learn more about how Chainguard can help your organization accelerate sales through enterprise readiness, visit our startups page.