Our thinking behind Heptio’s $25M Series B funding round

Craig McLuckie
Heptio
Published in
3 min readSep 13, 2017

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The momentum behind Kubernetes has been truly breathtaking. When Joe Beda (CTO of Heptio), Brendan Burns (currently at Microsoft) and I started the project a few short years ago we thought we had the opportunity to create something quite unique. The level of community engagement and industry acceptance of Kubernetes exceeded our wildest expectations and has been truly humbling. Kubernetes has quickly emerged as the leader in the container orchestration space.

It is, however, still relatively early days for the project. Kubernetes really speaks to systems engineers, but there is a huge body of work to do to make it truly accessible to engineers who don’t necessarily have the time to ‘dig into’ the details of the project. Upstream versions of Kubernetes remain inaccessible to many from an operations and accessibility perspective. It is still too hard to deploy a Kubernetes cluster, qualify whether it is conformant, and stitch it into the fabric of enterprise IT systems.

Nine months into our journey, it has become clear that not only is the opportunity incredible, but there is a tremendous amount of work still to do. Our early customers have demonstrated an incredible need for product capabilities and additional services. To achieve that, we will need to significantly increase our level of investment in growing our team and serving our customers.

We also believe that the challenges that enterprise companies face as software systems become increasingly fundamental to their businesses cannot be solved by a single open source technology alone. Organizations of all sizes see open source cloud native technologies a path to not only avoid vendor lock-in, but get more out of the tech that powers their business. We aspire not only to connect them with the Kubernetes community, but also to partner with them to deliver and integrate full enterprise-grade solutions for the workloads that power their businesses.

We are incredibly excited to be partnering with world class investors who support our vision to make cloud native computing accessible to developers everywhere. Tim Porter from Madrona has been a great partner to us through the early growth of the company and offered to lead the round. Over the last few months we have also come to know LightSpeed Ventures well and believe that they are well aligned with our vision and bring tremendously valuable perspectives around open source software based businesses. Accel has similarly been remarkably supportive of our early growth and we are thrilled that they have chosen to participate in this round.

With this investment, we plan to dramatically scale our team and launch additional products that will make Kubernetes more accessible to developers and operators of all kinds. You can expect to hear more from us in the near future around our support, training, and professional services offerings, as well as the products we have been working on to reduce the complexity of building and running Kubernetes clusters in the multi-cloud and on-premises world.

Learn more about Heptio and our product and service offerings at Heptio.com.

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