Containous – the Creator of Traefik – Raises $10 Million in Series A Funding to Make Networking Boring
January 13, 2020Containous today announced it has closed $10 million in
Series A funding. The round is led by Balderton
Capital, with previous investors Elaia
and 360 Capital Partners also
participating. In addition to a massive open source community, Containous’
popular networking solutions are trusted and deployed by enterprises such as
eBay, Condé Nast, and Nutanix. The company simplifies the journey to
microservices networking for organizations of all sizes, who use Containous’
solutions to ease networking of their cloud applications, microservices, and
APIs.
The $10 million Series A will be used to quickly build up and expand
Containous’ unified and centralized management platform purpose-built for
cloud-native applications and microservices. The platform – the
first-of-its-kind – is driven entirely by developers and created to function as
one single tool that solves networking complexity. Containous will also
significantly increase its engineering and product teams to accelerate product
development for the benefit of the wider open source community and for
enterprises looking to build, ship, and run applications faster and more
efficiently.
“By taking the pain out of network management, we empower application and
engineering teams to focus on software development,” said Emile Vauge, CEO and
co-founder, Containous. “With Containous, users are free to build, iterate, and
ship their applications rather than wasting valuable cycles on networking and
infrastructure. We want development teams to view networking as a commodity,
because that’s what it really should be.”
“At Balderton, we are very excited about the emergence of organic online
communities – and some of the most productive and powerful communities to
emerge over the past decade have come from globally decentralized teams
collaborating on open source infrastructure software,” said Bernard Liautaud,
Managing Partner, Balderton Capital. “We believe that being open source is
becoming a prerequisite for widely-adopted, high-quality infrastructure
software today, and that the most compelling and strategic aspect of open
source software is a strong community driving the creation, development and,
ultimately, the adoption of that software. The team at Containous has led the
massive Traefik community with tremendous success over the last few years, and
we are humbled to be joining it. With IDC forecasting that there will be more
than 1.8 billion enterprise container instances by 2021, we anticipate
Containous will increasingly play a very meaningful – and welcome – role in
developers’ workflows. We look forward to playing an active role in the
community as Containous continues to evolve its core product, Traefik,
alongside its newer releases (Maesh and TraefikEE) to transform networking for
businesses, developers, and end users around the world.”
Containous delivers three solutions for drastically simplifying networking:
- Traefik is the cloud-native edge router that manages inbound connections from the internet to the infrastructure. The open source solution is built to be easy to use, dynamic and automatic, and is integrated with all major cloud-native tools and orchestrators. Traefik is designed from the ground-up for microservices and containers.
- TraefikEE is the production-grade and distributed version of Traefik developed for – and trusted by – larger enterprises. The EE version splits proxies and controllers to increase security, supports cluster deployment through high scalability and availability, and includes a dashboard, operations tools, and bundled 24/7 support.
- Maesh is a very easy to use (but feature-rich) service mesh built on top of Traefik that is capable of managing service-to-service communications inside a Kubernetes cluster with a non-invasive and per-node design (as opposed to side-car proxy architectures). The solution is SMI-compliant.
Containous’ Series A infusion comes at a time of
explosive growth for the networking company. Traefik, which debuted version 2.0
in September 2019, has now been downloaded more than 1.4 billion times from
Docker Hub (with two-thirds of those in the past six months) and has hundreds
of thousands of deployments worldwide in companies spanning all sizes and
industries. Traefik has particular momentum in the enterprise space, counting
eBay, Condé Nast, Nutanix, Talend, Mozilla, and PrestaShop among the users
leveraging the solution in production environments. Born in – and powered by –
an extraordinary open source
community, Traefik is one of the most popular infrastructure projects in
the world, with more than 26K
stars on GitHub.
“Enterprise IT is undergoing a major revolution, driven by Cloud and Edge
computing and by DevOps practices,” said Marc Rougier, Partner, Elaia. “Containous’
mission is to develop best of breed, open source, end-to-end solutions to serve
Enterprise networking needs within this new technological context. At Elaia we
invested early in Containous, convinced by Emile Vauge’s vision and impressed
by the exceptionally fast adoption of their initial product, Traefik. Two years
later, Containous has crushed the 1 billion downloads barrier, delivered to top
customers around the world, and extended its product portfolio. We are very
proud to now partner with Balderton to tackle the next phase of Containous’
scale up.”