Dell Technologies Capital, the investment arm of Dell Technologies, led the $25-million funding round in Lightbend, the creator of the popular cloud-native platform Akka, according to a statement.
Previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Greylok Partners, IBM, Intel, Juniper Network, and Shasta Ventures also participated in the funding round for the company that claims to be the leader in reactive architecture.
Lightbend is a key player in enterprise transformation toward real-time, cloud-native applications. The company said it provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructures, such as Red Hat OpenShift.
The company’s founder, Jonas Boner, is the original author of the Reactive Manifesto movement and created Akka, the most popular abstraction method for managing state and scale across nerveless deployments.
The firm claims that Akka is used by more than one million developers at companies such as Capital One, Fortnite, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Verizon. It helps users handle billions of transactions at a massive scale in their cloud-native system.
Tyler Jewell, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, said Lightbend is well-positioned to take advantage of two key trends that will dramatically change the enterprise computing landscape. Jewell will join the company’s board of directors.
As a pioneer in the concepts of Reactive programming a decade ago, Lightbend has been extraordinarily prescient and has built some of the most flexible and advanced frameworks and runtimes for native cloud computing on the market today,” said Jewell.
The latest funding round brings Lightbend’s total funding to date to US$85 million. The funding from Dell Technologies Capital allows the company to take advantage of the market opportunity and remain cash flow positive while further scaling the business, said Lightbend CEO Mark Brewer.
“As the founding member of the newly-established Reactive Foundation, we look forward to helping empower developers within the Kubernetes ecosystem and beyond, and bringing our vision for Reactive architecture to developers worldwide,” Brewer added.
Lightbend is headquartered in San Francisco and maintains offices in New York, Atlanta, Quebec, Switzerland, and Sweden.
The funding round followed Salesforce acquisition of Vlocity, a cloud and mobile software provider, for approximately $1.33 billion in February. Cloud data platform Snowflake also raised $479 million in funding that values the company at $12.4 billion.
