News

Docker Coffers Boosted by Another $95 Million

The container company is a darling of venture capitalists.

• By Keith Ward
• 04/14/2015

In "The Social Network," Justin Timberlake (playing Sean Parker) scoffs at the notion that a company worth $1 million is cool. "You know what's cool? A billion dollars." If that's the standard, then Docker may have just become the latest cool company.

Docker Inc., the open source container maker, has secured another round of funding, to the tune of  $95 million. And with it, The New York Times speculated in a story today, the latest infusion may have pushed Docker past the $1 billion mark in valuation. In all, Docker has raised about $160 million in the last two years.

Exponential Growth
The last valuation, according to the Times, was $400 million, from September 2014. If that's accurate, Docker has more than doubled its worth in half a year. In the last funding round, Docker got $40 million, led by Sequoia Capital. At that time, Docker CEO Ben Golub blogged about the technology's growing status. "Our user community has grown exponentially into the millions and we have a constantly expanding network of contributors, partners and adopters. Search on GitHub, and you'll now find over 13,000 projects with 'Docker' in the title."

Containers are one of the hottest technologies in the industry right now, and are increasingly popular in cloud settings for their ability to run in highly distributed environments. Docker is one of many contenders making containers, but it has the most visibility and name recognition.

The company is expanding beyond its core mission of packaging up applications, and is now adding management, security, clustering and other services. As one example, it recently bought software-defined networking (SDN) company SocketPlane, to further integrate with scalable platforms.

Batteries Included, but Swappable
Following the SocketPlane acquisition, Docker Founder and CTO Solomon Hykes expressed his vision of the broadening Docker mission. "… we felt they were the right people to carry forward our 'batteries included, but swappable' approach to drive a thriving networking ecosystem."

Numerous companies are experimenting with or implementing their own container technologies, as well. They include Microsoft, which has also partnered with Docker. Other companies, unhappy that Docker has grown so large and more enterprise-worthy, are making alternative containers that stay closer to the original idea of simple, platform-agnostic application portability.