DEVOPSdigest

Portainer.io announced their $6 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, joined by prominent European investor Sonae Investment Management and leading New Zealand technology investor Movac.

The round, which follows close on the heels of Portainer's $1.2 million seed round announced in August 2020, will fund Portainer.io's worldwide user expansion and product development, as Portainer.io charts the course for the future of container management. Portainer.io will also continue to scale and develop its enterprise offering, Portainer Business, which launched in December 2020.

Launched in 2017 as an open source tool for managing containers in the Docker Swarm environment, Portainer.io's open source Community Edition has grown to become a popular universal container management tool with a powerful Kubernetes GUI, in addition to supporting Docker, Docker Swarm, and Azure ACI, while Portainer Business offers enterprise-level security and control for deploying containers in business-critical environments.

Portainer.io's focus on containers without the frustration has driven its explosive expansion: since January 2018, Portainer's community now spans 190 countries, 4.8 million total users, and 500,000 regular monthly users, achieving 50% year-on-year growth. Portainer.io's team of advisors includes developer advocate Kelsey Hightower and Bryan Rodriguez, a specialist for orchestration at the edge, boosting their focus on Portainer's Edge Compute features.

"This investment lets us double down on pivoting Portainer from a simple management dashboard, into a fully-featured, container-native application deployment and management tool. We started by adding support for Azure ACI, then added Kubernetes, and now in 2021 we plan to add support for an ever increasing number of CaaS platforms, such as AWS Fargate, Google Cloud-Run, etc. On top of this we will continue to enhance what users can do within Portainer itself, extending into the Git-Ops/Automation realm." said Neil Cresswell, Co-Founder and CEO of Portainer.io. "Portainer is laser-focused on unleashing the power of containers for everyone, giving existing IT/Developer teams, home users, students, and beyond the tools they need to manage containers without complicated code or risky deployments."

"Portainer's open source community has incredibly strong engagement and global scale, which is a true testament to the value the product provides..." said Mike Droesch, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.

"From our experience in different sectors across Europe, we've gotten to know how challenging it can be to manage cloud infrastructure in a fast-paced environment of shorter development cycles, increasing complexity and skills shortage," said Benjamin Junior, Investment Manager at Sonae IM. "Portainer attracted our attention for its easy adoption, light-weight deployment and great user experience, that has supported its massive adoption from the open-source community as a whole and leading enterprise customers in the market. With the growth of edge locations and accelerated development of ever complex IoT applications, Portainer provides a mission-critical solution to abstract container management and focus developer work in application development."