Startup funding: Open source software Docker raises fund to fuel its newest push

Docker Inc., the company behind the popular Open Source software and container platform Docker, has received another fresh capital this week. The San Francisco-based company has raised $75 million in its latest funding round, valuing the Startup at around $1.3 billion.

According to Silicon Angle, the latest investment will help fuel the company’s newest push in the computing market.

The company plans to use the fresh capital to beef up its sales and marketing muscles.

The funding news follows a massive management shuffle, which reportedly involved former CEO of Concur Technologies Steve Singh and Docker’s co-founder Solomon Hykes. In the new management, Singh has taken the top post at Docker, replacing Docker’s co-founder Ben Golub. Docker’s co-founder Solomon Hykes has replaced Marc Verstane, who has stepped down from his role as Executive Vice President for Products. Additionally, the company also plans to appoint experts in operations and enterprise sales in the coming months.

What is Docker software?

For starter, Docker is an open source platform for distributed applications that allows software developers and system administrators to build and run distributed applications. With support from Docker Inc., companies can now shrink the development process from months to minutes, seamless move workloads between data centers and the cloud computing space.

The primary goal is to create software that can be moved and stored in the cloud and run anywhere regardless of the hardware and operating system (OS). The open source container platform has been a huge success. The platform has been downloaded more than 12 billion times and used by big name companies, which include ADP, GE, PayPal, Intuit, Goldman Sachs, and France’s Societe Generale.

About the company

Founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco, California, Docker Inc. is the technology company behind the popular open source software container platform and the chief sponsor of the entire Docker ecosystem. The company was first started by Solomon Hykes in France as an internal project within the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company dotCloud. The company’s technology represents an evolution of dotCloud’s proprietary technology, which was built on Cloudlets open source project.

In September 2013, dotCloud announced it first technology partnership, with open source solutions provider Red Hat.Then, in October 2013, dotCloud was officially renamed to Docker Inc. The next month, the company announced another big partnership with Microsoft.

And in November 2014, Docker announced a new service for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The San Francisco-based startup has been growing fast. By 2015, the company’s market value was estimated at over $1 billion, making it what the tech industry called a unicorn company.

Docker’s popularity has gained lots of attention and buzz, especially in the venture capital world. The company’s investors include some of the tech world’s most notable venture capital firms, which include AME Cloud Ventures, Ashvin Patel, Benchmark, Brainchild Holdings, Chris Sacca, Coatue Management, Eric Urhane, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northern Trust, Sequoia Capital, Kenny Van Zant, and Yahoo’s founder Jerry Yang.

Overall, the company has raised a total of $180.92 million in venture capital fund in its eight funding rounds. In April 2015, it received its biggest fundraising, a whopping $95 million, in its Series D funding round led by Insight Venture Partners.

In addition, Docker has also made several acquisitions to beef up its technology portfolio. These include cloud computing firm Orchard (2014), software testing platform Koality (2014), open source software SocketPlane (2015), container management Kitematic (2015), container technology firm Tutum (2015), cloud infrastructure firm Unikernel Systems (2016), container orchestration Conductant (2016), and storage platform Infinit (2016).

Currently, Docker competes against the likes of Mesosphere Inc. and the Google-led Kubernetes. The company hasn’t provided much information about its latest funding round and market valuation.