On Tuesday, Docker, Inc. announced the finalization of a whopping $95M in Series D funding. The Series D funding round was led by Insight Venture Partners with additional participation from new investors Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust and existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. The funding will be used to strengthen strategic partnerships with companies such as Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft, all of whom have differentially supported Docker on their respective cloud platforms and contributed to its go-to-market strategy. In addition, the funding will be used to accelerate product development, particularly as it relates to Docker management and application development lifecycle tools that promise to enhance the value of the Docker offering.
Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker, remarked on the significance of the funding raise as follows:
Our responsibility is to give people the tools they need to create applications that weren’t possible before. We will continue to honor that commitment to developers and enterprises. We think they are still looking for a platform that helps them build and ship applications in a truly standardized way, without lock-in or unwanted bundled features. That is what we set out to build, and we are not yet content with what we have achieved so far. We are getting a clear message from the market that they like what we are building, and we plan to keep building it. The financing enables us to deliver on that promise.
Although Docker has received clear market validation, Hykes notes that the company remains “not yet content” with what it has accomplished to date and hence hopes to use the extra funding to respond to customer needs to use a “platform that helps them build and ship applications in a truly standardized way.” Because Docker can run on a multitude of infrastructure platforms, users can avoid vendor lock-in while enjoying the benefits of Docker’s portability and ability to enhance operational agility by preserving the integrity of applications in development and production environments alike. Today’s Series D financing constitutes a dramatic affirmation of the validity of Docker’s business model and potential for even further growth by way of an investment that gives Docker the freedom to cement partnerships with major players in the IaaS-cloud community while enhancing its product portfolio and suite of tools for automating the management of clusters of Docker containers in distributed and non-distributed application environments alike. With an extra $95M in the bank, expect Docker to take ownership of the emerging cottage industry of vendors dedicated to Docker management tools and processes and bring Docker to more and more production-grade environments enterprises in anticipation of an IPO. Today’s Series D raise brings the total capital raised by Docker to roughly $160M, building upon a $40M Series C raise in September.
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