Platform9 continues to draw investment dollars, noting this week it raised $22 million in its latest funding round. The Series C round pushed the company’s total haul to $36.5 million since being founded in 2014.
The latest investment round included funds from new sources in Canvas Ventures and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Canvas partner Gary Little joined Platform9’s board of directors.
Past investors Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures also participated in the latest round.
Platform9 said it plans to use the latest cash infusion to increase its sales force, product and marketing teams, and boost spending on engineering. The company’s products are focused on cloud and hybrid cloud software-as-a-service platforms for enterprises. The products include container management using Kubernetes, hybrid cloud management using OpenStack, and its own open source serverless Fission product.
Platform9 said it manages more than 200 enterprise cloud deployments.
Platform9 was launched in 2014 by former VMware engineers. The launch included $4.5 million in Series A funding from Redpoint. The company picked up an additional $10 million in mid-2015 as part of a Series B funding round, which included Menlo Ventures.
Platform9 started with the managed OpenStack product in 2015. That was followed last year by its managed Kubernetes platform. More recently it released its Fission framework.
Container Focus
Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9, said container management has become an important aspect of its business.
“Containers are now in the picture and nobody talks about [infrastructure-as-a-service] without talking about microservices,” said Maskasky. “It’s been an interesting shift we have seen in infrastructure reconstruction and container tools.”
Like much of the industry, Platform9 is solidly behind the use of Kubernetes for container orchestration. Recent reports have shown Kubernetes controlling more than 70 percent of the container orchestration market. This far outpaces other platforms such as Docker Swarm and Mesosphere.
“We think the battle for container orchestration has been won,” Maskasky said. “We are no longer trying to convince customers on Kubernetes.”
The container market is expected to grow from $762 million in revenues last year to nearly $2.7 billion in 2020, according to 451 Research.
Greg Zwakman, an analyst at 451 Research, said the firm’s research showed strong breadth and diversity of vendors tapping into containers or integrating and partnering for more support of containers in their products. The firm also noted surprise at the maturation speed of the container software market based on production, use, and revenue growth.
Maskasky said it’s likely there will be some consolidation in the mid-term as competitors look to bolster their positions.
“We are definitely going to see consolidation over the next couple of years,” Maskasky predicted. “But from our perspective we think we have a certain edge compared to alternatives. This is not just a part solution, but a full platform for customers at different parts of their cloud journey.”
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