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Formerly known as Datawise, Diamanti was founded by a team of professionals from well-known tech companies such as Cisco, Veritas, and VMware.

San Jose, Calif.-based Diamanti handles input/output between containers and the network fabric. Like many other container startups, Diamanti’s technology was built to incorporate Kuberenetes enhancements. At the Red Hat Summit in June, Diamanti announced its support for the Red Hat OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS), keeping businesses’ applications inside Linux containers.

Founders: Jeff Chou (Cisco), Gopal Sharma (Cisco), Amitava Guha (Cisco, Symantec)

Funding: $12.5 million: CRV, DFJ Venture, GSR Ventures, Goldman Sachs

Portworx, a container storage company whose founders come from firms like Google, Microsoft, NetApp, and Nimble Storage, says its servers can help companies reduce infrastructure costs by 70 percent.

The company also says that although containers have transformed application deployment, data storage has not been able to keep up. Portworx holds that its storage provides speed because it is delivered as a container itself, turning commodity x86 servers into a converged storage node.

Founded in 2014, Portworx now has about 20 employees. It is also worth noting that Eric Han, Portworx’s senior product director, spearheaded Google’s early container efforts and was a founder of open source project Kubernetes.

Founders: Murli Thirumale (Dell, Citrix), Goutham Rao (Dell, Citrix), Vinod Jayaraman (Dell, F5)

Funding: $8.5 million (Mayfield, MSD Capital)

Founded in 2012, Hedvig claims that it is modernizing container storage. (Shockingly, the company isn’t alone in its belief that it’s on the cutting edge.) In May, Hedvig was awarded a Gold Stevie Award in the cloud storage and backup category at the 14th annual American Business Awards.

Hedvig announced its CloudScale Reference Architectures at DockerCon in June, which the company says will simplify the deployment of containers for cloud environments. Hedvig's announced partners include Cisco, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Docker, AWS, and VMware.

Founders: Avinash Lakshman (Facebook, Amazon), Srinivas Lakshman (HSBC, Chrysler)

Funding: $30.5 million (Atlantic Bridge, Redpoint, True Ventures, Vertex Ventures)

Aqua, formerly known as Scalock, is a container security startup founded in early 2015 by IT security veterans Dror Davidoff and Amir Jerbi. The company quickly realized that containers present the next major development in data center technology and that containerized environments created new challenges in security, which the company says it will try to reinvent.

The Aqua Container Security Platform supports containers from Docker, CoreOS, Microsoft, and VMware and tracks a container’s status throughout its whole lifecycle. Aqua is based in San Francisco with an office in Ramat Gan, Israel.

Founders: Dror Davidoff (AdClarity), Amir Jerbi (CA Technologies)

Amount Raised: $4 million (TLV Partners, Shlomo Kramer, Mike Fey)

Tigera, based in San Francisco, is a container networking startup that calls itself the “home of the Canal.” This name comes from Tigera’s announcement in May, when it said its plan to integrate two open source cloud networking systems — Calico (from Metaswitch) and Flannel (from CoreOS) — into a new open source platform for container networking, called Canal.

Tigera worked with open source, cloud native, developer, and user communities to develop Canal. The company applies Calico’s network policy enforcement to Flannel’s connectivity options.

Most options for networking containers are relatively new, a fact that helped put Tigera on the map. Tigera’s team includes about a dozen engineers spread between its San Francisco and London locations. The company’s founders all have experience in networking from Metaswitch and helped lead Project Calico when it was overseen by Metaswitch.

Founders: Andrew Randall (Metaswitch), Christopher Liljenstolpe (Big Switch Networks), Alex Pollitt (Metaswitch)

Amount Raised: $13 million (New Enterprise Associates and Wing Venture Capital)