Buoyant, the company behind the popular open source Linkerd project and creator of the new "service mesh" category of cloud infrastructure software, today announced the close of $10.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Benchmark Capital, with additional participation from #Angels, a female-led investment group of current and former Twitter executives. Also joining the round were previous investors A.Capital, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, SV Angel, and the Webb Investment Network. The round brings Buoyant's total funding to date to $14 million and adds Peter Fenton to the Buoyant board of directors, just weeks after stepping down from the Twitter board.

"As the entire software industry moves to cloud computing, the way that applications are built and operated is changing dramatically," said Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark Capital and member of the board of Docker, New Relic and Yelp. "Buoyant's introduction of the service mesh has the potential to be as fundamental a component of microservices and cloud native software as TCP/IP was to network programming, and Linkerd's dramatic open source adoption over the past year is evidence of just how immediate of a need that is for companies."

The open source Linkerd service mesh provides reliability and safety to cloud applications by managing the communication between the "services" in an application. In applications designed for the cloud, this internal service-to-service communication forms a critical part of runtime behavior, but is often hidden and unmanaged, leading to unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cascading failures. By managing runtime communication and decoupling it from the application, Linkerd not only increases end-to-end system reliability, it allows companies to migrate their application between infrastructure implementations, data centers, and cloud providers, dramatically reducing risk of adoption and of provider lock-in.

"A service mesh like Linkerd can be one of the easiest ways for organizations to incrementally introduce something like Kubernetes into their existing tech stack," said Joe Beda, Kubernetes co-creator and co-founder of Heptio. "By abstracting service identity and discovery, Linkerd decouples application code from the infrastructure it runs on, allowing companies to migrate business logic from legacy systems to Kubernetes incrementally and to have a uniform layer of visibility and control across their entire stack, regardless of the underlying infrastructure."

Since its launch in 2016, Linkerd has seen widespread adoption across industries and verticals, ranging from startups like Rocket Lawyer, Zooz, and Monzo Bank, to established enterprises like PayPal, Oath, and Credit Karma. Earlier this year, Linkerd became the fifth hosted project with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open source group that also hosts the Kubernetes container orchestration project. This May, the service mesh category received further validation with the launch of Istio, a collaboration by Google, IBM and Lyft. Buoyant's recent announcement of Linkerd and Istio integration ties these projects together, allowing Linkerd and Istio to be used together as a unified service mesh. For more on our Istio integration, please read our blog here.

"The service mesh is essential to making cloud native software operationally viable," said William Morgan, Linkerd co-creator and CEO of Buoyant. "It brings one of the most critical part of your cloud application's behavior-the runtime communication between services-out of the realm of the invisible, implied infrastructure, and into the role of a first-class member of the ecosystem, where it can be monitored, managed and controlled."