Lightbend Secures $25 Million In Funding Led By Dell

By Dan Anderson • Mar 15, 2020
  • Lightbend — the leader in Reactive Architecture and the creator of the popular cloud-native platform Akka — announced it raised a $25 million financing round

Lightbend — the leader in Reactive Architecture and the creator of the popular cloud-native platform Akka — announced it raised a $25 million financing round led by Dell Technologies Capital. Previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, and Shasta Ventures also joined the round.

Including this round of funding, the company has raised over $85 million. In connection with the funding round, Tyler Jewell, a Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, joins the Lightbend board of directors.

Goldman Sachs estimates that the containerization of enterprise environments will become a $7 billion market opportunity by 2021. And three-quarters of that budget will be for deploying new applications enabled by containers especially cloud-native applications.

Lightbend’s cloud-native application platform helps developers meet the growing demand for applications that optimize resource consumption and scale dynamically by utilizing Kubernetes, microservices, and containers.

Jonas Bonér, the co-founder of Lightbend, is the original author of the Reactive Manifesto movement and is known for creating Akka — which is the most popular abstraction method for managing state and scale across serverless deployments. With over one million developers at companies like Capital One, Fortnite, LinkedIn, PayPal and Verizon, Akka helps its users handle billions of transactions at massive scale in their cloud-native systems.

Lightbend is also known as the company behind OSS application frameworks Play and Lagom, streaming data pipelines framework Cloudflow, the next-generation serverless project Cloudstate and the Scala programming language.

Key Quotes:

“As a pioneer in the concepts of Reactive programming a decade ago, Lightbend has been extraordinarily prescient and has built some of the most flexible and advanced frameworks and runtimes for cloud native computing on the market today. Their industry vision aligns with Dell Technologies Capital’s view of the future. Lightbend is well positioned to take advantage of two key trends that will dramatically change the enterprise computing landscape – they are the leader in Reactive architecture and enable serverless computing in a way unmatched by other vendors.”

-Tyler Jewell, a Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital

“The rise of serverless, Reactive systems, and real-time streaming data pipelines mean wholesale changes in how organizations and systems work with software. This funding from Dell Technologies Capital solidifies our plans to take advantage of this market opportunity, remaining cash flow positive while further scaling our business. As the founding member of the newly-established Reactive Foundation, we look forward to helping empower developers within the Kubernetes ecosystem and beyond, and bringing our vision for Reactive architecture to developers worldwide.”

-Mark Brewer, CEO of Lightbend