Rancher Labs Closes $20 Million Series B Funding Round

Container management software provider Rancher Labs announced a $20 million Series B funding round on Tuesday, led by new investor GRC SinoGreen.

Existing investors Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners participated in the round that will be used to support sales and marketing initiatives.

Rancher Labs launched its container management platform, called Rancher, at the end of March with support for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes. The platform supports a range of cloud environments as well as bare-metal infrastructure. Prior to its launch in general availability, Rancher Labs had over 2,500 companies join its beta program.

“What’s interesting is in that time this piece of technology has started to become a market,” Rancher Labs VP of sales and marketing Shannon Williams said in an interview with Talkin’ Cloud in March. “We talk about it as a private container service but our users call it lots of different things; they call it a cloud management platform, they call it a container cloud, I’ve heard it called containers-as-a-service. So fundamentally what this is the way within an organization that you can take containers and leverage them and manage them so you can run your applications in containers anywhere, on any infrastructure, consistently.”

Rancher is being used by DevOps teams to automate all aspects of running containers through the application lifecycle, Rancher Labs said.

“We are seeing a lot of attention and demand for our Rancher platform and feel it is due to our unique approach to container management,” Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs said in a statement. “Containerization has enabled organizations to do amazing things to improve application performance, availability and cost.  The next piece of this puzzle, which will really help to perfect container technologies, are the tools around the management of containers. We are excited to continue efforts in furthering our goal of providing users with the right tools to take advantage of container technologies, and the financial and organizational benefits they promise.”

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“Containers are rapidly disrupting software development and IT operations,” said Dr. James Zhang, partner at GRC SinoGreen. “Rancher Labs has shown through its amazing open-source adoption, that organizations see container management as critical to accelerating software development, and running applications reliably and efficiently in production.”