Docker raises $105M funding round to fuel its focus on developers

Docker has raised a fresh round of $105 million in funding, as it continues to focus on serving developers following the sale of its enterprise business to Mirantis in 2019.

The $105 million Series C funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and joined by Atlassian Ventures, Citi Ventures, Vertex Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, and Tribe Capital also participated in the round. Docker has now raised $163 million since the Mirantis deal closed, valuing the company at $2.1 billion.

“From that reset point we had to redo product strategy, go-to-market, and the business model, and this funding round is an example of a lot of those bets we made starting to pay off and come together,” Docker CEO Scott Johnston told InfoWorld.

Under Johnston, the new Docker has focused on serving developers building containerized applications, primarily through the Docker Build function, the Docker Engine container runtime, the Hub image repository, and the popular Desktop application, which Docker started charging enterprise customers to use last year.

Docker says it will use this latest funding round to invest in its product, focusing on developer productivity, trusted content, and ecosystem partnerships, and expand into new sales channels and geographies.

On the product side, this will involve greater security controls to enable enterprise developers to confidently use only trusted container images and more easily remediate vulnerabilities when they arise.

Docker will also look to expand its reach into new application architectures, such as serverless and WebAssembly. As Johnston sees it, both serverless and Wasm applications still get built with an Open Container Initiative (OCI) container at their core, so enabling developers to continue to build applications for these targets using the familiar Docker toolchain is a natural evolution of the product.

Coincidentally, Docker’s new funding round was announced just a day after the Docker founder Solomon Hykes announced a $20 million Series A funding round and launched a public beta for his new software startup, Dagger.