Docker, Inc., the commercial sponsor of the Docker open source project, secured $40 million in series C funding for its strategy in delivering distributed applications in cloud infrastrecture.
The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital and includes existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Jerry Yang. The company plans to use the funds to drive adoption of its platform in the enterprise and to broaden its rapidly growing ecosystem of application developers, system administrators, platform providers, and technology partners.
Docker provides a platform that enables any application to be created and run as a collection of consistent, low-overhead Docker containers that work across virtually any infrastructure. This new model liberates developers from application and infrastructure dependencies, significantly accelerates the software development lifecycle, and enables substantial improvements in infrastructure cost and efficiency.
There have now been 21 million downloads of the Docker platform, up from 3 million at DockerCon in June. Over 35,000 “Dockerized” applications are now available on the Docker Hub Registry, and more than 13,000 Docker-related projects have launched on GitHub. Docker has also seen rapid growth in the technology partner ecosystem with over 100 companies – including industry heavyweights Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware – having announced Docker–supporting platform initiatives.
“We are thrilled to have a firm like Sequoia – and an individual like Bill Coughran – join our team,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “This new partnership provides Docker with an unrivaled venture team and the resources to drive our vision for distributed applications. It’s a testament to the community and ecosystem that have helped Docker reach this important milestone.”
“Docker has emerged as the de facto standard of how you will build, deploy, and orchestrate applications for the cloud. Its impact on the industry will be huge. Ben, Solomon and the rest of the Docker team are incredibly focused on building an enduring technology company, and I am so proud of all they have accomplished in such a short period of time.” – Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners and Docker board member
- Docker is an open platform which can be used to build, ship, and run distributed applications on various clouds. The use of a container allows the same app to run unchanged on laptops, servers, data center VMs or the cloud — similar to the concept of shipping container for the transportation industry.
- Kubernetes is a container cluster management tool developed by Google. It builds on top of Docker to construct a clustered container scheduling service.
- In June 2014, Docker 1.0 was officially released, marking an important milestone for this open platform which can be used to build, ship, and run distributed applications on various clouds. Docker enables applications to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between environments. It consists of the Docker Engine, the de facto container standard, and Docker Hub, a new cloud-based service from Docker Inc., the start-up company behind the open source Docker project and chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem.
