Docker Raises $95M Series D Round For Its Container Platform

Docker, the company that kicked off the recent enthusiasm for containers two years ago, today announced that it has raised a $95 million Series D round led by Insight Venture Partners. New investors in this round include Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures also participated.

As Docker’s VP of enterprise marketing David Messina noted when I talked to him earlier this week, it’s interesting to see the support from financial services companies in this round. This somewhat atypical investment, he believes, speaks to the support Docker has from developer teams in all kinds of organizations and how these companies now look at Docker as a key platform for their teams.

“When our engineers discovered and started using Docker’s open source platform, they were immediately impressed by the portability it provides applications,” Goldman Sachs global co-head of its Technology Division Don Duet said in a statement today. “It inspired us to move towards a standardized infrastructure for packaging, shipping and running our applications based on Docker’s technology.”

Messina stressed that Docker did not have any immediate financial needs for the funding. Indeed, he told me that the company still hasn’t spent most of its Series B funding yet, but the Docker team decided to capitalize on its current momentum in order to be able to scale up as needed.

Currently, Docker is investing heavily in its go-to-market strategy, but also in the technology stack where it plans to expand the platform’s capabilities with a focus on networking, security and storage tools around its service. Messina cited the acquisition of software-defined networking startup SocketPlane as an example for how it is focusing on moving Docker forward in these areas. Docker is also hiring rapidly. The company now has about 120 employees, up about 4x from a year ago.

Messina also stressed that Docker decided to raise this round to make sure it can address enterprise demand going forward. He cited a recent Enterprise Technology Report that surveyed 685 enterprise CIOs. Among the respondents, Docker recorded the strongest buying intention score the researchers recorded in the six years they’ve run this survey. Messina also noted that about 50 percent of the companies in the current Docker Hub beta are Fortune 100 companies.

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