Ambassador Labs announced that it has secured a $20 million growth investment led by global software investor Insight Partners. In conjunction with the funding, the company has appointed Steve Rodda, a technology industry veteran, as the company's new Chief Executive Officer. Rodda replaces Richard Li, who will remain on the executive leadership team as Chief Product Officer and co-founder.

Rodda joins Ambassador Labs at a time of significant growth, with the company achieving over 200% year-over-year revenue growth. Ambassador Labs will use this additional investment to accelerate go-to-market initiatives and expand its open source and commercial product portfolios.

Steve Rodda brings an extensive background of technology and product management experience, with his early days spent as a programmer. He has maintained a consistent focus on delivering solutions to market that address customer challenges. He most recently served as chief executive officer at API design platform provider Stoplight. Prior to Stoplight, Rodda was chief operating officer at Cherwell Software (now owned by Ivanti) and led end-to-end delivery of the company's IT service management software solutions to support customer success. He has also held product leadership roles at SolarWinds and LOGICnow (currently owned by SolarWinds).

"I'm excited to lead Ambassador Labs at a time when Kubernetes has created an unprecedented market opportunity," said Rodda. "Ambassador Labs has a proven team and loyal customer base that has established it as a cloud native solutions leader. I look forward to guiding the team as we help organizations modernize how they build, ship, and run applications on Kubernetes."

To support the company's growth trajectory, Ambassador Labs has invested steadily in its leadership team with the most recent appointment of Deren Rehr-Davis as Vice President of Sales. Now, with the addition of Rodda as CEO, Richard Li will focus on product innovation and oversee the company's product teams to ensure continued delivery of solutions that accelerate Kubernetes adoption by developers and organizations worldwide.

The investment also comes at a time when organizational adoption of Kubernetes is at a record high. The CNCF 2021 Annual Survey reports that Kubernetes has become an industry standard, with usage rising across organizations globally, particularly in large enterprises.

"Ambassador Labs had early foresight into the market opportunity that surrounds Kubernetes and its impact on modern software development. They have impressed us with their focus on customer and developer success through rapid product innovation and go-to-market efforts," said Philine Huizing, Principal at Insight Partners. "As cloud native technologies like Kubernetes continue to fuel digital transformation in enterprises worldwide, we're excited to closely partner with Steve and the Ambassador Labs team who are well-positioned as leaders of this industry revolution."