Containous – creator of Traefik – raises $10M Series A to make networking boring

BY BALDERTON

Containous’ open source, cloud-native networking solutions top 1.4 billion downloads and have seen accelerated enterprise adoption throughout 2019.

Containous, the leading cloud-native networking company, has closed its $10M Series A round, led by Balderton, with previous investors Elaia and 360 Capital Partners.

The company simplifies the journey to microservices networking for organizations of all sizes, who use Containous’ solutions to ease networking of their cloud applications, microservices, and APIs.

In addition to a massive open source community, Containous’ popular networking solutions are trusted and deployed by enterprises such as eBay, Condé Nast, and Nutanix. 

“By taking the pain out of network management, we empower application and engineering teams to focus on software development. With Containous, users are free to build, iterate, and ship their applications rather than wasting valuable cycles on networking and infrastructure. We want development teams to view networking as a commodity because that’s what it really should be. 

Emile Vauge, CEO and co-founder, Containous

Emile Vauge, CEO and co-founder, Containous

Containous delivers three solutions for drastically simplifying networking:

  • Traefik is the cloud-native edge router that manages inbound connections from the internet to the infrastructure. 
  • TraefikEE is the production-grade and distributed version of Traefik developed for – and trusted by – larger enterprises. 
  • Maesh is a very easy to use (but feature-rich) service mesh built on top of Traefik that is capable of managing service-to-service communications inside a Kubernetes cluster with a non-invasive and per-node design (as opposed to side-car proxy architectures)

Containous’ Series A infusion comes at a time of explosive growth for the networking company. Traefik, which debuted version 2.0 in September 2019, has now been downloaded more than 1.4 billion times from Docker Hub (with two-thirds of those in the past six months) and has hundreds of thousands of deployments worldwide in companies spanning all sizes and industries.

Traefik has particular momentum in the enterprise space, counting eBay, Condé Nast, Nutanix, Talend, Mozilla, and PrestaShop among the users leveraging the solution in production environments. Born in – and powered by – an extraordinary open source community, Traefik is one of the most popular infrastructure projects in the world, with more than 26K stars on GitHub.

Traefik is one of the most popular infrastructure projects in the world, with more than 26K stars on GitHub.

The new funding will be used to quickly build up and expand Containous’ unified and centralised management platform purpose-built for cloud-native applications and microservices. Containous will also significantly increase its engineering and product teams to accelerate product development for the benefit of the wider open source community and for enterprises looking to build, ship, and run applications faster and more efficiently.

We believe that being open source is becoming a prerequisite for widely-adopted, high-quality infrastructure software today, and that the most compelling and strategic aspect of open source software is a strong community driving the creation, development and, ultimately, the adoption of that software. The team at Containous has led the massive Traefik community with tremendous success over the last few years, and we are humbled to be joining it.

Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner, Balderton Capital

Read Colin's post on why we invested here

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