Anchor
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2025
- HeadquartersSan Francisco, United States
- Headcount1–10
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
Anchor firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Anchor
- Legal name
- Anchor Security, Inc.
- Website
- https://anchor.dev
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2025
- Operating status
- Acquired
- Headcount range
- 1–10 employees
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Anchor industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Certificate Management / PKI & TLS Automation
- NAICS
- Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182)
- SIC
- Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- SSL/TLS Offload & PKI/Certificate Services (ADC‑Integrated) (HDAFAHAI)
- akta.pro secondary industry
- API Security & Service-to-Service Security (mTLS, Service Mesh Security) (HDABAHAN)
Keywords
Where Anchor is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- San Francisco
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
Anchor business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- Subscription Plans (Solo, Team, Enterprise): Tiered subscription model with a free Solo plan for individual developers, a $16/month Team plan for multi-user organizations, and custom Enterprise pricing. Revenue is generated through recurring monthly or annual subscriptions, with additional per-user and per-certificate charges beyond included limits.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Monthly | Free forever for solo developers; 1 user, private certs, 8 certs/month + $1/month per additional cert, GitHub SSO, 90-day activity history, community support |
| Subscription | Monthly | $16/month for teams; multi-user org, 2 users included + $16/month per additional user, 16 certs/month, 1-year activity history, email support. Public certs coming soon. |
| Subscription | Annual | Custom pricing for organizations with advanced needs; everything in Team plus custom cert limits, invoice and annual billing, full audit history, priority support and enterprise SLA |
Go-to-market motion1 record
Distribution channels2 records
Marketing channels7 records
Anchor product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Anchor offers a developer-focused SaaS platform for managing public and private TLS/SSL certificates via the ACME protocol. The product automates the full certificate lifecycle—provisioning, renewal, and proactive revocation—through a hosted private Certificate Authority and a proprietary ACME Relay that handles delegated DNS validation and EAB tokens. It targets software developers and teams who need browser-trusted HTTPS for local development (via the lcl.host subdomain service) and production-grade mTLS, eliminating manual PKI toil.
Product overview
Anchor is a developer-friendly certificate management platform offering effortless TLS/SSL encryption. The core product provides public and private certificate management via the ACME protocol, complemented by lcl.host for local HTTPS development, ACME Relay for scalable public certificate provisioning, and Service to Service TLS for mutual authentication. The platform supports Go and JavaScript with built-in language packages.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- lcl.host: A Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) service that maps subdomains to localhost (127.0.0.1) for local HTTPS development environments, made by the Anchor team.
Products and services
- Anchor Certificate Management Platform Developer-friendly SaaS platform for managing public and private TLS/SSL certificates using the ACME protocol, providing PKI encryption for applications and infrastructure across local, staging, and production environments.
- lcl.host A Fully Qualified Domain Name service that maps subdomains (e.g. *.lcl.host) to 127.0.0.1, providing browser-trusted secure contexts for local HTTPS development without modifying /etc/hosts or managing DNS records.
- ACME Relay Public certificate relay service that proxies ACME requests to public Certificate Authorities, managing DNS validation, EAB tokens, and certificate issuance on behalf of users, eliminating the need for write access to DNS zones.
Quantifiable outcome
- Get HTTPS setup in 2 minutes
- +1 more outcomes
Companies that use Anchor
Customer profileSegments1 record
Ideal customer profiles2 records
Anchor technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- No
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Feature5 records
Anchor partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
One partnership is on record.
- Keycardflagship (acquisition)Keycard acquired Anchor.dev in February 2026 to add runtime security capabilities for autonomous AI coding agents. The acquisition enabled Keycard to evaluate policy on each tool call at the application layer, eliminating the tradeoff between agent capabilities, autonomy, and security controls. Anchor's team, with backgrounds at Cloudflare, GitHub, and Heroku, brought expertise in automating X.509 certificates and making identity primitives governable by security teams.
Scale indicators3 records
Recent moves5 records
Expansion highlights5 records
Anchor competitors and assessment
Company assessmentBroad incumbents
- Cloudflare: Operates Cloudflare Origin CA and offers free universal SSL plus managed certificate issuance, and employs several of Anchor's former founders — overlapping with Anchor on CA and TLS automation.
- Sectigo: Commercial CA offering public TLS certificates and enterprise PKI platforms — competes directly with Anchor's enterprise private CA and lifecycle management story.
- Venafi: Machine identity management platform focused on certificate and key lifecycle at enterprise scale — competes with Anchor's certificate lifecycle and visibility value proposition for larger customers.
- DigiCert: One of the largest commercial CAs and a major provider of TLS, PKI, and certificate lifecycle management to enterprises — comparable to Anchor at the enterprise-PKI layer.
- Keyfactor: Enterprise PKI as-a-service and certificate lifecycle automation platform — directly comparable to Anchor's certificate visibility, automation, and renewal capabilities at the enterprise tier.
- AWS Certificate Manager: Amazon's managed public and private certificate service bundled with AWS workloads — competes with Anchor's hosted private CA for cloud-native developers and ACME Relay use cases.
- Google Trust Services: Google's publicly trusted CA — competes with Anchor on public certificate issuance and is the issuance backbone for many ACME integrations Anchor's relay proxies to.
Direct peers
- Smallstep: Developer-focused certificate management platform offering private CA, mTLS, and SSH workflows with an ACME-style developer experience — directly comparable in mission and target persona to Anchor.
- Let's Encrypt: Non-profit public CA pioneering free, automated ACME certificate issuance — the canonical free-tier competitor to Anchor's certificate issuance and ACME lifecycle management.
Emerging players
- mkcert: Lightweight open-source tool for generating locally trusted development certificates — overlaps Anchor's lcl.host use case on the developer-local-HTTPS pain point.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat4 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights6 records
Customer concentration
Anchor social profiles
Digital presenceAnchor financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Anchor leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles1 record
Anchor funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds1 record
Investors1 record
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Anchor M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Anchor
What does Anchor do?
Anchor offers a developer-focused SaaS platform for managing public and private TLS/SSL certificates via the ACME protocol. The product automates the full certificate lifecycle—provisioning, renewal, and proactive revocation—through a hosted private Certificate Authority and a proprietary ACME Relay that handles delegated DNS validation and EAB tokens. It targets software developers and teams who need browser-trusted HTTPS for local development (via the lcl.host subdomain service) and production-grade mTLS, eliminating manual PKI toil.
Is Anchor a public or private company?
Anchor is a private company. It is classified as corporate owned and is currently acquired.
When was Anchor founded?
Anchor was founded in 2025. It employs 1 to 10 people.
Where is Anchor based?
Anchor is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, in the North America region.
How does Anchor make money?
One revenue line is on record: subscription Plans (Solo, Team, Enterprise).
Who are Anchor's main competitors?
Broad incumbents on record are Cloudflare, Sectigo, Venafi, DigiCert, Keyfactor, AWS Certificate Manager and Google Trust Services. Direct peers are Smallstep and Let's Encrypt. mkcert is listed as an emerging player.
Does Anchor have an API?
No public API is recorded for Anchor.
What industry is Anchor in?
Anchor's product category is Certificate Management / PKI & TLS Automation. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAFAHAI, SSL/TLS Offload & PKI/Certificate Services (ADC‑Integrated), with a secondary code of HDABAHAN, API Security & Service-to-Service Security (mTLS, Service Mesh Security). Its NAICS code is 5182 and its SIC code is 7370.