Today, Madrona is very pleased to announce that we are leading the new $25M Series B round in Heptio, partnering with existing investor Accel Partners and new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Heptio is another example of a “Day One” investment for Madrona. In November of 2016, we participated in the Heptio Series A led by Accel. In doing so, we partnered with Heptio founders and Kubernetes co-creators Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda at the very formation of their company whose mission is to (initially) make Kubernetes more accessible for all enterprises and (longer term) provide the standard framework for delivering enterprise apps in a multi-cloud world.
Our thesis with the Series A was pretty simple: (1) one of the largest trends in enterprise computing was the move to cloud native technology (container-based distributed microservices) and operations, (2) Kubernetes had become the leading way to orchestrate and manage container-based applications, (3) customers were beginning to demand better ease of use, accessibility, and an independent provider of support, services and training, and (4) the best team in the world to build this company began with Craig and Joe, two of the Kubernetes co-creators.
Since that time, the team has executed extremely well and, if anything, the market for Kubernetes has continued to explode even beyond expectations. Today, 50 of the Fortune 100 are using Kubernetes across industry verticals from retail to banking to manufacturing. Kubernetes continues to be the most active open source project in the world, and all the major cloud platforms are adopting it. Craig and Joe have begun to build a world class team at Heptio, launched three initial products, landed a number of high-profile (although still confidential) customers, and laid the groundwork for key partnerships.
Given all this progress, and our conviction that Heptio can be one of the next billion-dollar cloud companies in Seattle, we were honored to partner with great open source and infrastructure investors like Ping Li from Accel and John Vrionis from Lightspeed to lead the Series B. We are looking forward to continuing to partner closely with the Craig, Joe, and team to build Heptio through this next phase and beyond.
Related Insights
