SECURITY

Minimus opens its entire secure container image catalog to developers for free

Container image startup Minimus Inc. today announced that it’s removing the registration wall on its entire catalog of secure container images, making the full library free to any developer.

The company tied the decision to artificial intelligence tools that are now finding software vulnerabilities faster than teams can patch them.

Minimus Community Edition is the name for the free tier. It opens the full library across major and minor versions, including thousands of container images with near-zero known vulnerabilities. Some carry Federal Information Processing Standards, Center for Internet Security, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Security Technical Implementation Guide compliance. Each is continuously built from source on a distributionless base, which the company says delivers the smallest possible attack surface.

Minimus is betting the timing matters. AI models are turning up vulnerabilities at a pace that remediation has not matched and the company argues that removing the registration wall lets developers and the large language models working alongside them pull hardened images straight into their workflows.

“Models like Mythos and Glasswing have significantly increased the volume and pace of vulnerability discovery, while remediation capabilities are failing to keep pace,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Ben Bernstein. “It is more clear than ever that security is bigger than any one company or industry. By making our entire catalog of images available without barriers, we are giving developers both accessibility and reliability necessary to build more safely and consistently.”

The free tier ships with Minicli, a command-line tool built for both developers and AI agents to discover images, inspect their configuration and automate migration. Minimus images are drop-in replacements for commonly used container images, so teams can cut vulnerabilities without redesigning applications or workflows. The company also provides signed software bills of materials for transparency and it places no cap on how many images a developer can download.

Developers can now standardize on the same images used by production teams without waiting for budget approval, procurement or enterprise contracts, the company said.

Minimus was founded in October 2022 by Bernstein, Dima Stopel and John Morello, the team behind container security pioneer Twistlock Ltd. and the authors of NIST SP 800-190. The company says its approach prevents 98% of cloud software vulnerabilities from ever existing by building images from scratch using only the minimal software needed to run an application. Minimus raised $51 million in seed funding from YL Ventures and Mayfield in April 2025.

A paid Minimus Enterprise Edition remains for teams that need contractually backed remediation service-level agreements, single sign-on, self-hosting on any registry and custom images that Minimus maintains under the same support terms.

Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner at YL Ventures, said the move puts competitive pressure on the market and positions Minimus to become “the default image catalog for more communities and organizations.”

Image: Minimus