Kubermatic Raises $6M Seed Funding to Accelerate Growth of Their Open Source Kubernetes Automation Platform

Kubermatic, creator of the widely adopted Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP), has raised $6M in seed funding, led by Nauta Capital. With Bastian Nominacher and Martin Klenk, co-founders of Celonis, renowned angel investors joined the round. Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform fully automates all aspects of operating Kubernetes clusters in hybrid- and multi-cloud as well as on the edge. The company will use the seed funding to increase open source adoption, broaden the international customer base and accelerate product innovation.

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), use of containers in production has risen by 300% between 2016 and 2020 and 91% of organizations running containers use Kubernetes for orchestration. The leading technology research and consulting house Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of  organizations will be running containerized applications in production. At the same time, only an estimated 5% of all enterprise applications have been containerized so far. As a result, Gartner expects container management software and services to rapidly grow and reach $944M in 2024.

With several global enterprise companies using Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform to automate and drive their transformation towards cloud adoption, some of Kubermatic’s existing customers include T-Systems MMS, Allianz, and Siemens. Sebastian Scheele, CEO and co-founder of Kubermatic said: “Our vision is to help customers achieve power through automation. We build the world’s most adaptable and autonomous software delivery platform because we want IT teams to focus their time on writing innovative applications that rival the likes of Amazon and Google.”

Guillem Sague, Partner at Nauta Capital, commented: “Over the last five years, we have seen Kubernetes become the leading technology for container orchestration. Kubermatic has been an early adopter and is one of the main contributors to the Kubernetes project. Therefore we are excited to partner with a European OSS company that is a front runner in their industry.”

Martin Klenk, co-founder and CTO at Celonis added: “At Celonis, we pioneered process mining to run business operations entirely on data and intelligence. Containers and Kubernetes are essential to achieve the flexibility, speed, and resilience companies need for scalable business models like ours. Among our enterprise customers, I can observe that container technologies and Kubernetes are becoming the standard for multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud and edge strategies to modernize existing IT infrastructures. I strongly expect Kubernetes to prevail for all mission-critical enterprise applications in the medium term. For this reason, I am truly excited to join Kubermatic’s seed financing round.”