Container management software company Rancher Labs Inc., the creator of the most widely used Kubernetes management platform, has closed a $40 million Series D funding round led by Telstra Ventures, Australia’s largest telecom firm.
The funding round was also backed by private equity fund HarbourVest and brought the six-year-old Rancher’s total funding to $95 million to date.
The funding round also included participation from existing investors Mayfield, Nexus Venture Partners, GRC SinoGreen, and F&G Ventures.
In a statement, the company said it plans to use the Series D funding to drive what it has termed a “run Kubernetes everywhere” strategy that involves bringing the container orchestration software to new markets that need to run workloads closer to the network edge.
Last year, Rancher Labs launched a lightweight Kubernets distribution platform called K3s, which is meant to address the growing demand for smaller clusters of software containers that run on x86, Arm64, and Armv7 processors in edge computing environments.
The company said it created K3S because existing Kubernetes distributions are too complex and memory-intensive for edge scenarios, where information is processed onsite rather than in a remote data center.
In 2019, Rancher saw 169 percent year-over-year revenue growth. The company now has more than 350 enterprise customers.
Sheng Liang, CEO at Rancher Labs said the company has won over customers with a vision of treating Kubernetes “as a common compute protocol, almost like TCP/IP of computing.”
“Just as Linux became the standard computing platform for the data center, cloud, and devices in the 2000s, we believe Kubernetes is fast becoming the ubiquitous enterprise computing platform for multi-cloud, heterogenous IT environments in the 2020s,” Liang said.
A recent survey by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation found that 84 percent of companies are running containers in production this year and that most of those are using Kubernetes to manage them.
