Containous – the Creator of Traefik – Raises $10 Million in Series A Funding to Make Networking Boring

Balderton Capital leads the round as Containous’ open source, cloud-native networking solutions top 1.4 billion downloads and see accelerated enterprise adoption throughout 2019

San Francisco, CA – January 13, 2020 – Containous, the leading cloud-native networking company, today announced it has closed $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Balderton Capital, with previous investors Elaia and 360 Capital Partners also participating. In addition to a massive open source community, Containous’ popular networking solutions are trusted and deployed by enterprises such as eBay, Condé Nast, and Nutanix. The company simplifies the journey to microservices networking for organizations of all sizes, who use Containous’ solutions to ease networking of their cloud applications, microservices, and APIs.

The $10 million Series A will be used to quickly build up and expand Containous’ unified and centralized management platform purpose-built for cloud-native applications and microservices. The platform – the first-of-its-kind – is driven entirely by developers and created to function as one single tool that solves networking complexity. Containous will also significantly increase its engineering and product teams to accelerate product development for the benefit of the wider open source community and for enterprises looking to build, ship, and run applications faster and more efficiently.

“By taking the pain out of network management, we empower application and engineering teams to focus on software development,” said Emile Vauge, CEO and founder, Containous. “With Containous, users are free to build, iterate, and ship their applications rather than wasting valuable cycles on networking and infrastructure. We want development teams to view networking as a commodity, because that’s what it really should be.”

“At Balderton, we are very excited about the emergence of organic online communities – and some of the most productive and powerful communities to emerge over the past decade have come from globally decentralized teams collaborating on open source infrastructure software,” said Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner, Balderton Capital. “We believe that being open source is becoming a prerequisite for widely-adopted, high-quality infrastructure software today, and that the most compelling and strategic aspect of open source software is a strong community driving the creation, development and, ultimately, the adoption of that software. The team at Containous has led the massive Traefik community with tremendous success over the last few years, and we are humbled to be joining it. With IDC forecasting that there will be more than 1.8 billion enterprise container instances by 2021, we anticipate Containous will increasingly play a very meaningful – and welcome – role in developers' workflows. We look forward to playing an active role in the community as Containous continues to evolve its core product, Traefik, alongside its newer releases (Maesh and TraefikEE) to transform networking for businesses, developers, and end users around the world.”

Containous delivers three solutions for drastically simplifying networking:

• Traefik is the cloud-native edge router that manages inbound connections from the internet to the infrastructure. The open source solution is built to be easy to use, dynamic and automatic, and is integrated with all major cloud-native tools and orchestrators. Traefik is designed from the ground-up for microservices and containers.
• TraefikEE is the production-grade and distributed version of Traefik developed for – and trusted by – larger enterprises. The EE version splits proxies and controllers to increase security, supports cluster deployment through high scalability and availability, and includes a dashboard, operations tools, and bundled 24/7 support.
• Maesh is a very easy to use (but feature-rich) service mesh built on top of Traefik that is capable of managing service-to-service communications inside a Kubernetes cluster with a non-invasive and per-node design (as opposed to side-car proxy architectures). The solution is SMI-compliant.
  

Containous’ Series A infusion comes at a time of explosive growth for the networking company. Traefik, which debuted version 2.0 in September 2019, has now been downloaded more than 1.4 billion times from Docker Hub (with two-thirds of those in the past six months) and has hundreds of thousands of deployments worldwide in companies spanning all sizes and industries. Traefik has particular momentum in the enterprise space, counting eBay, Condé Nast, Nutanix, Talend, Mozilla, and PrestaShop among the users leveraging the solution in production environments. Born in – and powered by – an extraordinary open source community, Traefik is one of the most popular infrastructure projects in the world, with more than 26K stars on GitHub.

“Enterprise IT is undergoing a major revolution, driven by Cloud and Edge computing and by DevOps practices,” said Marc Rougier, Partner, Elaia. “Containous’ mission is to develop best of breed, open source, end-to-end solutions to serve Enterprise networking needs within this new technological context. At Elaia we invested early in Containous, convinced by Emile Vauge’s vision and impressed by the exceptionally fast adoption of their initial product, Traefik. Two years later, Containous has crushed the 1 billion downloads barrier, delivered to top customers around the world, and extended its product portfolio. We are very proud to now partner with Balderton to tackle the next phase of Containous’ scale up.”

About Containous
Containous brings the future of cloud-native networking by offering powerful tools to ease the deployment of your modern IT environments. The company’s popular open source projects include Traefik, the cloud-native edge router with more than 1.4 billion downloads and used by the world’s largest web companies, and Maesh, a service mesh designed to simplify service-to-service communications for developers building modern, cloud-native applications. Founded in 2016, Containous’ mission is to simplify cloud-native adoption for all enterprises. For more information, visit containo.us and follow @Traefik on Twitter.

About Balderton Capital
Balderton Capital is a London-based venture firm focused exclusively on backing the best European-founded technology companies. In the two decades since our founding, we have worked with hundreds of extraordinary European founders, and have raised eight funds totalling more than $3bn. Previous exited investments include Betfair (FTSE: BET), Magic Pony (Twitter), NaturalMotion (Zynga), Recorded Future (Insight Partners), Sunrise (Microsoft), Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and Yoox Net-a-Porter (BIT: YNAP). Among Balderton’s current portfolio of over 90 companies are Aircall, Carwow, Citymapper, Contentful, Frontier Car Group, GoCardless, Hiya, The Hut Group, Kobalt Music, Labster, Nutmeg, Prodigy Finance, Revolut, SOPHiA Genetics, Vestiaire Collective, Vivino and Voi.

About Elaia
Elaia is an independent Paris-based venture capital firm managing over €350m focused on digital & deep tech startups, from early stage to growth development. Elaia backs tech disruptors such as Criteo (IPO), Orchestra Networks (sold to Tibco), Sigfox, Teads (sold to Altice), Mirakl, tinyclues, Shift Technology. For more information visit www.elaia.com.