As enterprises accelerate the deployment of LLMs and agentic workflows, they are hitting a critical infrastructure bottleneck: the container base images powering these applications are riddled with inherited security debt. Echo, an Israeli startup, is announcing a $35 million in Series A funding today (bringing its to-date total to $50 million in funding) to fix this by fundamentally reimagining how cloud infrastructure is built.The round was led by N47, with participation from Notable Capital, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne. But the real story isn’t the capital—it’s the company’s ambitious goal to replace the chaotic open-source supply chain with a managed, “secure-by-design” operating system.The Hidden Operating System of the CloudTo understand why Echo matters, you first have to understand the invisible foundation of the modern internet: container base images.Think of a “container” like a shipping box for software. It holds the application code (what the developers write) and everything that code needs to run (the “base image”). For a non-technical audience, the best way to understand a base image is to compare it to a brand-new laptop. When you buy a computer, it comes with an Operating System (OS) like Windows or macOS pre-installed to handle the basics—talking to the hard drive, connecting to Wi-Fi, and running programs. Without it, the computer is useless.In the cloud, the base image is that Operating System. Whether a company like Netflix or Uber is building a simple web app or a complex network of autonomous AI agents, they rely on these pre-built layers (like Alpine, Python, or Node.js) to define the underlying runtimes and dependencies.Here is where the risk …
