Burgeoning Ecosystem Standardizes on Docker to Transform How Applications Are Built, Shipped and Run in the Modern Datacenter
SAN FRANCISCO – April 14, 2015 – Docker, Inc., the organization behind the open platform for distributed applications, today announced that it has raised $95 million of Series D funding. This latest infusion builds on the successful Series C round raised in September, and enables Docker to address the needs of the millions of ecosystem users and thousands of enterprises that have standardized on Docker’s technology. The financing will enable deeper integration with go-to-market partners such as AWS, IBM and Microsoft, who have made strategic product investments in support of Docker’s open source technology. It will also fuel new platform capabilities across the application development lifecycle, solidifying Docker as the foundation for a new generation of distributed applications.
The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with new contributions from Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures also participated in the round.
“This financing is a strong vote of confidence in Docker management, and strengthens the company’s ability to fulfill the needs of the millions of developers who have made the commitment to utilizing its breakthrough products and services in their daily work,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder of Insight Venture Partners. “Docker will be able to continue to make additional hires in general to put more critically-needed products into the hands of developers.”
Docker’s model enables any application to be built and run as a consistent, low-overhead Docker container, liberating developers from infrastructure concerns and dramatically increasing innovation. Enterprises using Docker have reported that it shrinks deployment cycles from weeks to minutes and drives up to 20X improvement in computing resource efficiency. More than 300 million instances of Docker’s technology have been downloaded from its hosted service, Docker Hub, enabling organizations to create both an agile application environment and an agile organization.
“Our responsibility is to give people the tools they need to create applications that weren’t possible before,” said Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker. “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.”
Dockerized applications are enabling increased productivity and continuous business innovation for organizations such as the BBC, Gilt, Goldman Sachs, Groupon, ING, Spotify and Yelp. Companies like these are often initially exposed to Docker by a few development teams that integrate Docker into their workflows and are able to immediately demonstrate the productivity benefits of the platform across the development organization. These grassroots efforts quickly receive executive attention when, almost overnight, application enhancements take minutes when they used to take months.
“With the accelerating pace of digitization in the financial industry, the breadth, complexity and diversity of our software and infrastructure services has grown materially,” said Don Duet, global co-head of the Technology Division at Goldman Sachs. “The ability to manage and run business-critical technology at scale in an agile and adaptive ecosystem has become fundamental to our firm. When our engineers discovered and started using Docker’s open source platform, they were immediately impressed by the portability it provides applications. It inspired us to move towards a standardized infrastructure for packaging, shipping and running our applications based on Docker’s technology.”
An April 2015 survey of 685 enterprise CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research highlights that Docker technology has the strongest buying intention score (known as a Net spending intentions score or “NET score”) ever recorded in the six years of the firm’s research, which covers 274 technology vendors across 24 sectors of enterprise technology. This aligns with the positive feedback that Docker has received on its flagship commercial product, Docker Hub Enterprise, which is being beta trialed by a number of Fortune 100 companies and will be made broadly available later this quarter.
“The combination of strong product demand and a rapidly-expanding ecosystem has put Docker on a growth trajectory far beyond what most companies experience in this phase of their development,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “This type of financial support, in addition to the high caliber of this group of investors, provides Docker with the resources and guidance needed to meet the demands of all aspects of our community – from open source contributors to Fortune 100 enterprises. Over the course of the last six months, we’ve exceeded every growth milestone we set for the company and the community. With the continued support of our investors, partners and community, Docker will continue to disrupt organizational conventions, transforming monolithic teams, processes and applications into more productive and agile microservices environments.”
Additional Information
About Docker, Inc.
Docker, Inc. is the company behind the Docker open source platform, and is the chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications. With Docker, IT organizations shrink application delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workloads between data centers and the cloud, and can achieve up to 20X greater efficiency in their use of computing resources. Inspired by an active community and by transparent, open source innovation, Docker containers have been downloaded 300 million times and Docker is used by millions of developers across thousands of the world’s most innovative organizations, including eBay, Baidu, the BBC, Groupon, ING, Yelp, Spotify, Yandex, and Cambridge HealthCare. Docker’s rapid adoption has catalyzed an active ecosystem, resulting in more than 100,000 “Dockerized” applications, over 40 Docker-related startups, and integration partnerships with AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Rackspace, Red Hat and VMware.
Docker, Inc. is venture backed by AME Cloud Ventures, Benchmark, Coatue, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Northern Trust, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel , Trinity Ventures, and Y Combinator.
