Docker Raises $40M in Series C Financing to Drive Open Source Adoption

Docker has secured $40 million from investors for its open-source open container virtualization framework for developers and system administrators to build, ship and run distributed applications. The company said it plans to use the financing to drive the adoption of its platform in the enterprise and broaden its ecosystem of application developers, system administrators, platform providers and technology partners.

Sequia Capital led the Series C round of financing, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang. These additional funds bring the San Francisco-based open source platform’s total financing to $66 million to date.

Also part of the funding, Bill Coughran, who joined Sequoia after eight years as a senior vice president of engineering at Google (GOOG), will represent the Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm on Docker’s board of directors.

While Docker CEO Ben Golub seems pleased with the company’s latest round of funding, he believes the money isn’t what’s most important. This is what he said this morning in a company blog post:

“While the size, composition, and valuation of the round are great, they are really a lagging indicator of the amazing work done by the Docker team and community. They demonstrate the amazing impact our open source project is having. Our user community has grown exponentially into the millions and we have a constantly expanding network of contributors, partners, and adopters.”

David Messina, vice president of marketing at Docker, told Talkin’ Cloud in an interview that Docker always considers “what is in the best interest for both the company and the Docker community at-large” before going forward with any kind of financing.

“We believe that we are on a path to building a world-class company and ecosystem, and are not focused on a sale or quick exit,” he said. “The fact that we took a very large round at a high valuation should be viewed as a signal that we are playing long.”

Even though Messina would not comment on Docker’s evaluation, Businessweek today reported that sources close to the matter evaluate the company at around $400 million.

“In just over a year and a half, we have built a dedicated and active community with over 600 contributors to Docker,” Messina said. “We have witnessed unprecedented growth of the open source platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications.”

“Docker provides a platform that enables any application to be created and run as a collection of consistent, low-overhead Docker containers that work across virtually any infrastructure,” he said. “This new model liberates developers from application and infrastructure dependencies, significantly accelerates the software development lifecycle, and enables substantial improvements in infrastructure cost and efficiency.”

The news follows German-based cloud firm cloudControl’s purchase of Docker’s dotCloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.

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