Tetrate, the enterprise service mesh company, today launched with $12.5M in funding, led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from 8VC, Intel Capital, Rain Capital and Samsung NEXT. The funding round also includes participation from industry executives Pankaj Patel, former Chief Development Officer at Cisco; Guido Appenzeller, Chief Product Officer at Yubico and former CTO Cloud & Networking at VMware; BV Jagadeesh, founder of Netscaler & Managing partner at KAAJ Ventures and Shiva Rajaraman, Chief Product Officer at WeWork, and others supporting Tetrate's mission. In addition to building an enterprise-grade service mesh platform, Tetrate plans to use the new funding to expand its open source leadership and deepen its contributions to the open source community.

Tetrate aims to disrupt the multi-billion dollar networking market by leveraging Envoy and Istio, the industry standard open source "service mesh" networking projects for the microservices world. Envoy is the microservices- friendly network load balancer that is replacing older generation tools (Nginx, HA-Proxy etc) in webscale companies such as Lyft, Pinterest and Square. Istio, created at Google, is the control plane layer over Envoy. Tetrate augments these projects with enterprise-grade scalability, performance and ecosystem adapters, while also extending them to work in brown-field virtual machine-based environments both in public and private clouds.

Founded by the pioneers of gRPC and Istio from Google, Tetrate's team comprises core maintainers of Envoy, key engineers of Istio, and other leading open source experts. Tetrate team members will host Service Mesh Day 2019, the first industry conference focused on service mesh, on Mar 29, 2019 in San Francisco, supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Google.

"Fortune 500 enterprises need a microservices-friendly networking layer to power their digital transformation, including application modernization and public/hybrid cloud adoption," said Varun Talwar, CEO of Tetrate and formerly co-creator of Istio at Google. "Tetrate's mission is to create a secure and flexible application networking layer to help enterprises transition from their decades-old rigid networking stack. Our tools and technologies will help customers with availability and manageability of their applications as they undergo this transformation."

A recent survey from Dimensional Research conducted in April 2018, indicated that 86% of companies expect microservices to be a default part of their application stack in next 5 years.

"We worked closely with the core Envoy and Istio contributors at Google and Tetrate," said Mike O'Brien, Director of Platform Engineering at Trulia. "They helped us avoid common pitfalls, put Istio in production, and allowed us to collaborate on usability improvements."

Tetrate also announced a collaboration with Google for operating hybrid cloud environments with Istio as well as one with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

"Service meshes are integral to organizations as they begin their cloud-native evolution," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO/COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. "I'm thrilled to see the launch of Tetrate to bring their broad service mesh expertise to the enterprise. They have been pioneers in the enterprise service mesh space through their contributions to Envoy, Istio and the broader CNCF ecosystem."

"Google Cloud's leadership in service mesh technologies stems from our goal of making hybrid cloud seamless for customers. The Tetrate team brings strong expertise in this space for cloud-native and brownfield deployments," said Prajakta Joshi, Senior Product Manager for Cloud Networking, Google Cloud. "We look forward to collaborating with Tetrate to help our joint customers harness these technologies for their digital transformation."

Envoy production usage has jumped from 4% of large organizations to 24% from March - October 2018, as per a recent CNCF survey. Tetrate announced that the company will release certified builds of envoy proxy to ease the adoption of Envoy on various platforms. Along with that, they announced a list of other open source tools to accelerate organizations' transition to microservices.

"Open source should be an integral part of any company's software and operations strategy today," said Envoy founder and Lyft Engineer Matt Klein. "Interoperability will be the key factor in the next phase of cloud adoption, so having deep roots within the open source community gives Tetrate instant credibility among cloud-first companies."

"Tetrate's team drove some of the fundamental innovations for the microservices networking stack thereby winning the confidence of CNCF, Google Cloud and Envoy Creator Matt Klein," said Deepak Jeevankumar, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital. "We look forward to helping Tetrate bring their innovations to Fortune 500 enterprises undergoing digital transformation journeys."