ClusterHQ™, The Container Data People™, today announced a $12 million Series A funding round led by Accel Partners London, with participation from Canaan Partners as well as existing investors. ClusterHQ will use the funds to expand technical and go-to-market resources to help organizations use containers in production. The funding represents the largest Series A investment in the container ecosystem to date.
With five years’ experience solving data problems for container-based applications, ClusterHQ is the company behind Flocker, the popular open-source project for containerizing stateful services – for example, the databases, queues and key-value stores that underpin modern microservices architectures. Flocker lets organizations run their data-backed services in containers without losing the operational management features that they’ve enjoyed with virtual machines for the past decade.
Containers have taken enterprise IT by storm in recent months, for example Docker’s container platform went from under three million downloads in June 2014 to over one-hundred million by January 2015. Fueling the next level of growth means providing tools for managing stateful services such as databases, which are at the heart of most applications. ClusterHQ will address the essential operational requirements of enterprise IT – high availability, disaster recovery, failover, live migration and backup for these services.
“Having closely followed the evolving needs of enterprise IT organizations, we believe that enterprise adoption of container technology will be greatly accelerated when containerization offers the same data management and protection solutions that enterprise IT organizations have come to expect from virtualization,” said Kevin Comolli, Partner at Accel Partners, who is be joining the company’s board of directors. “ClusterHQ is uniquely positioned to deliver these solutions, modernized for a container-based world.”
ClusterHQ recently added storage industry veteran and serial entrepreneur Mark Davis as CEO to help drive its leadership in the market for managing stateful containers.
“As an investor in Mark’s previous company, from its founding through the strategic acquisition by VMware, Canaan Partners has seen the enormous value created by flexible storage for modern applications,” said Maha Ibrahim, General Partner at Canaan Partners. “We are excited to support ClusterHQ as it delivers powerful enterprise storage into the new world of containers, DevOps and microservices.”
Taking advantage of the Silicon Valley and global networks of Accel Partners and Canaan Partners, Davis will expand ClusterHQ’s San Francisco Bay Area headquarters to complement the company’s UK-based development team.
“ClusterHQ’s heavily oversubscribed Series A is an enthusiastic endorsement of the enormous opportunity to provide solutions for stateful container-based applications,” Davis stated. “In and around the company, the excitement is high about our work on the data layer for applications based on the Docker platform. With this capital infusion from our powerful syndicate of investor partners, ClusterHQ will expand its role in the container ecosystem.”