Sysdig commemorates 10 Years of Falco
News at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 has seen real-time, AI-powered cloud defence company Sysdig announced a $70,000 ($52,000) donation to the Falco project through the Linux Foundation’s crowdfunding initiative.
The donation comes as Falco celebrates its 10th anniversary and on the heels of a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey reporting that 82% of AI workloads are now built on Kubernetes, up from 54% just one year earlier.
Sysdig’s contribution reinforces both the project’s continued momentum and position as the open source standard for cloud-native runtime threat detection as AI adoption accelerates and runtime security becomes mission-critical.
Today, Falco, a CNCF-graduated project, has surpassed 200 million downloads. Public adopters of Falco include Shopify, GitLab and Booz Allen Hamilton, with maintainers and contributors from companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM and Red Hat.
“Falco was born when containers were new and runtime security was an afterthought,” said Loris Degioanni, founder and CTO of Sysdig and Co-Creator of Falco. “Ten years later, Kubernetes is running the world’s most critical AI workloads and runtime is no longer optional. Falco isn’t just protecting containers. It’s protecting organizations’ most sensitive data.”
Sysdig says its donation to Falco will accelerate project innovation, expand community participation and strengthen its long-term sustainability.
Stupendous stipends
The funding from Sysdig will support feature development grants to speed the delivery of new capabilities; contributor stipends to recognise and retain key contributors; technical writer stipends to improve both documentation and user experience.
“Sysdig’s targeted donation to Falco is a significant monetary contribution to a CNCF project and sends a powerful signal about the importance of sustaining open source security innovation,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO at the CNCF. “Falco is a foundational runtime security project and investments like this help ensure that maintainers are supported, contributors are empowered and innovation can continue at the pace the community demands. Sustained funding is critical to the health of open source projects and this commitment sets a strong example for how companies can responsibly invest in the ecosystems they depend on.”
This investment builds on recent ecosystem momentum, including extensibility advancements with projects like Stratoshark, community plug-ins such as Falcoya and the launch of the Sysdig Open Source Community.
The decade ahead
The investment is also hoped to ensure that Falco is well-positioned to meet the challenges of the decade to come.
Additionally, the Falco community is also introducing no-code contribution pathways, enabling contributors of all talents to support documentation, design, events and education and making it easier than ever to participate in the project’s growth.
The company says that what began as an open source project to solve real-time container visibility is now the global standard for cloud-native runtime security.
