Heptio, founded by two of the creators of Kubernetes to accelerate the growth of the Kubernetes community and make the platform more accessible to businesses of all sizes, announced the closing of a $25 million Series B funding round. Led by Madrona Venture Group and joined by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners, this latest funding comes less than a year after the company's first round of $8.5 million bringing the total raise to $33.5 million.
"This new funding accelerates our growth and enables us to look beyond Kubernetes to support businesses' IT transformation efforts in a hybrid-cloud world," said Heptio CEO, Craig McLuckie. "We are excited to partner with investors who share our enthusiasm and support our vision to bring cloud native computing to all IT organizations."
Kubernetes is an open source platform for automating the deployment, scaling and management of application containers. Containers have emerged as an important tool for enterprise software developers, and a critical stepping stone to cloud-native IT deployments. Containers simplify the process of deploying software into a production environment, and create legitimate portability between different cloud environments, or between an on-premises and cloud environment.
Heptio founders Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, along with Brendan Burns, originally developed Kubernetes while at Google and released it to the open source community. Since then, Kubernetes has become the industry's de facto standard for managing and orchestrating containers. Heptio allows companies to best leverage this vibrant ecosystem, speeding integration of Kubernetes into IT environments while reducing the cost and complexity for production deployment at scale.
"Joe, Craig and the talented team they have built at Heptio are already seeing incredible reception for their approach to making Kubernetes accessible for the enterprise," said Tim Porter, managing director, Madrona Venture Group. "Being in the cloud capital of the world in Seattle, we know this is the ideal team to accomplish Heptio's mission of providing the standard for cloud native operations and enterprise app delivery in a multi-cloud world." As part of the funding, Porter will join the Heptio board of directors.
"Heptio's Professional Services completed a comprehensive review of our existing architecture and delivered an updated design that ensured we were making the most of our Kubernetes infrastructure," said Suman Sabbani, Manager, DevOps of Continental ITS. "Considering our reliance on open source and cloud infrastructure for critical IT operations, we gladly engaged Heptio with a support subscription for our production launch and ongoing operation."
For more details and thoughts about Heptio's Series B funding written by its CEO Craig McLuckie, go to heptio.com.