Weaveworks announced a $15 million Series B round today led by GV (the artist formerly known as Google Ventures).
Accel, which invested in its earlier $5 million Series A also participated. The company has raised $20 million so far with this round.
Weaveworks has created a set of open source tools for managing, monitoring and securing containers, the latest hot technology for developers and operations in the enterprise. The company plans to use the money from this round to create a commercial product for companies who want more structure than the open source product set provides.
“The next step for us is an integrated commercial offering. This will be built from our open source products,” CEO Alexis Richardson, wrote in a blog post announcing the funding. What’s more, the company has plans to offer a cloud service, which is currently in Beta.
If you think about the evolution of the datacenter, we started with monolithic applications. The idea was to get these big applications working and then leave them in place. Companies only upgraded when they absolutely had to.
Today, that model won’t fly because developers need to update much more rapidly and employees need access to the most current tools to compete in a rapidly shifting market place. Containers provide a way to break down applications as a set of micro services, which can be delivered rapidly, do their job and then simply disappear.
That means a company could be delivering hundreds or even thousands of containers, each required to launch at a certain time and perform a discrete task. It takes a tremendous level of software coordination to make that happen, but up until recently, developers and operations (often known as DevOps) had to cobble together their own tools to manage this process.
This worked fine for the early adopters who were willing to do that kind of heavy lifting, but for a technology to truly enter the mainstream and capture a majority of the market it requires a set of off-the-shelf tools companies can purchase and plug into their systems management regimen.
That’s where Weaveworks comes in. It provides a way to manage all of those moving parts and actually visualize the container ecosystem you’ve created as it moves through its lifecycle, helping to simplify a complex set of activities.
While Weaveworks isn’t the first company to offer a container management solution, GV is betting that they can be a leader in this rapidly growing space — and that’s what today’s investment is all about.