Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done

Today we’re excited and humbled to announce Docker’s Series B raise of $23 million to accelerate our mission of delivering tools development teams love to quickly take their ideas from code to cloud. The round was led by Tribe Capital with participation from our existing investors, Benchmark and Insight Partners. Arjun Sethi, Tribe co-founder and partner, will join the Docker board. 

This would not have been possible without the Docker team: Thank you for giving each other your best, every day, despite the disruptions of the refocusing, the pandemic, the overnight switch to work-from-home, and so much more. We also thank our developer community of users, contributors, customers, partners, and Docker Captains – your enthusiastic engagement throughout this past year was invaluable.

Hit Refresh

Tribe sees in Docker what we saw in November 2019 when we refocused the company: the opportunity to build on the bottoms-up developer love of the Docker experience and provide a collaborative app development platform for development teams to accelerate getting their ideas from code to cloud. And that’s just what we did.

Key inputs to Tribe’s investment decision were our results this last year, which included attracting 80,000 developer participants to DockerCon 2020, adding 1.8 million new registered developers for a total of more than 7.3 million, and growing our annual recurring revenue (ARR) 170% year-over-year. From their own “Magic 8 Ball” analysis of Docker, Tribe concluded that Docker has “a brand halo with a peer set you can count on one hand among developers. Such an asset is rarely and hard-earned. By doubling down on what earned that place in developers’ hearts, Docker seeks to further entrench and evangelize that brand.” It’s an opportunity to create an “N-of-1” company, like Tribe portfolio companies Carta and Slack. 

The Road Ahead

Financings are milestones in company-building, not the destination. This raise will accelerate our build-out of our collaborative app development platform for development teams, so they can spend more time building and sharing applications that impact their organizations. Specifically:

Collaboration. The complexity of microservices-based app development and the new “virtual-first” nature of development teams increases friction when collaborating, which in turn slows shipping. To address this, we’re focusing on helping team members easily and quickly share with each other their in-process work, get better visibility into colleagues’ output and pipeline state, and benefit from the intermediate build and task results of others.

Content. Microservice’s modularity, the ability for development teams to compose their app using a mix of custom code they write with standard components, like databases and base images, can significantly compress the time it takes to get an app working. Of course, any development team using third-party components must trust its software supply chain. This is the root of the popularity of Docker Official Images and Docker Verified Publisher images as well as of our integrated secure supply chain tools with Snyk and JFrog. With this raise, you’ll see us expand the breadth and depth of content from both open source projects and ISVs as well as deliver additional tools to help development teams increase software supply chain confidence, security, and visibility.

Ecosystem. Docker already simplifies app development for teams while providing them choice. Whether interoperability with popular container orchestrators (eg, Kubernetes, AWS ECS, Azure ACI, Swarm), 100% compatibility with the major container runtimes (e.g., Docker Engine, containerd), or simultaneous builds of multi-architecture apps (e.g,. x86, ARM), Docker does so without any additional burden on the development team. To enable teams to continue to benefit from partner innovations throughout the container ecosystem look for us to continue to drive open standards together with ecosystem partners (e.g., OCI, Compose spec, Notary v2). In addition, we will deliver more APIs and SDKs to enable development teams and partners to integrate their tools much more quickly and easily.

You can see in the above our continued focus on helping development teams by simplifying app development complexities while expanding choice, which enables them to get their ideas from code to cloud as quickly as possible. In parallel, we remain committed to growing a sustainable business that continues to provide a 100% free experience for developers while meeting the demands of professional development teams with additional subscription services. Doing so allows us to scale the Docker experience to the next 10 million developers to make our ecosystem that much stronger.

Join Us!

We couldn’t be more excited to continue our journey and double-down on the successes of the past year. As always, you – the Docker developer community – play a critical role in defining and contributing to our direction, and we invite you to join us, whether it’s participating in DockerCon 2021, contributing to the Docker product roadmap, becoming a Docker Verified Publisher, or simply trying Docker for free.

Let’s together go and get ship done!