Microsoft and HPE lead Mesosphere $73.5 million funding round
Thu 24 Mar 2016
Mesosphere, creator of the world’s first data centre operating system, has today confirmed that it has received significant strategic investment from two U.S. tech giants, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
According to today’s release, Mesosphere, built on open-source Apache Mesos project, closed $73.5 million (approx. £52 million) in a Series C funding round.
The Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) is designed to allow businesses to build their own microservices-based applications, operate big data systems and run huge production container deployments. The kit was pitched by HP Ventures managing director Lak Ananth as “the most exciting new enterprise operating system since Linux.”
With HPE and Microsoft leading this latest funding round, Mesosphere’s total funding to date tallies at almost $126 million.
“Mesosphere is at the center of three of the biggest tech trends today: cloud, containerization and microservices,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president at Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise business, stated in the release. He added that DCOS is the preferred option of Microsoft enterprise customers due to its experience in the container orchestration field.
The DCOS operating system is currently used at mega-scale by customers including Verizon, Netflix and Twitter. It also underpins Microsoft’s Azure Container solutions and the multinational is planning to further roll out the technology to run on Windows Server, as well as Linux – expected to enter beta stage over the next few months.
The funding announcement comes as Mesosphere launches a new product called Velocity for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), which will allow companies to establish faster application development lifecycles and boost their adoption of containers. The startup also debuted version 1.0 of its Marathon container orchestration platform.
“For enterprises that depend on production-grade workloads, ‘container operations’ is the new game in town,” said Florian Leibert, Mesosphere CEO and co-founder. “Only Mesosphere ties everything together in a single seamless system, helping enterprises go from source code to datacenter-scale production, running containers and microservices alongside big data and analytics systems.”
