Docker, Inc., the company behind the Docker open source platform, today announced that it has partnered with Sequoia and raised $40 million in series C funding. Coming on the heels of a successful series B in January, this round represents a nearly 3X increase in round size and an even greater increase in valuation, reflecting the explosive growth of the Docker platform and ecosystem, and the broad interest in Docker as a solution for delivering distributed applications. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Jerry Yang also participated. Docker will use the funds to drive adoption of its platform in the enterprise and to broaden its rapidly growing ecosystem of application developers, system administrators, platform providers, and technology partners.

Launched in March 2013, Docker is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications. Docker provides a platform that enables any application to be created and run as a collection of consistent, low-overhead Docker containers that work across virtually any infrastructure. This new model liberates developers from application and infrastructure dependencies, significantly accelerates the software development lifecycle, and enables substantial improvements in infrastructure cost and efficiency.

Dockerized applications empower continuous business innovation shaped by software and that potential has fueled rapid adoption by web-scale companies such as Baidu, Cambridge Healthcare, eBay, Gilt, Groupon, Spotify and Yandex. These companies are reporting acceleration in development/build/test cycles from weeks to minutes, and increases in data center efficiency by 10X or more. This has spurred interest from more traditional enterprises such as financial institutions and government agencies, which are looking for similar tangible benefits delivered with enterprise-grade solutions and support from Docker.

“At Gilt, we are moving all of our software to run on Docker's platform. Gilt runs on a very modern micro services architecture,” said Michael Bryzek, Gilt Groupe, CTO and founder. “Docker helps us keep services isolated and simplifies our continuous delivery pipeline that in turn encourages innovation and experimentation across all of our teams.”

“Docker's platform has become an important part of how we build and deploy new services at New Relic,” said Nic Benders, director of site engineering, New Relic. “For example, when we launched the New Relic Insights product, Docker gave our development team more independence and let them focus on bringing a great piece of software live on an aggressive schedule. Docker has helped us deliver new services faster than ever before.”

Customer successes like Gilt and New Relic that were showcased at DockerCon in June – coupled with the release of Docker 1.0 and the Docker Hub collection of management tools – have triggered exponential usage growth. There have now been 21 million downloads of the Docker platform, up from 3 million at DockerCon. Over 35,000 “Dockerized” applications are now available on the Docker Hub Registry, and more than 13,000 Docker-related projects have launched on GitHub. Docker has also seen rapid growth in the technology partner ecosystem with over 100 companies – including industry heavyweights Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware – having announced Docker–supporting platform initiatives.

Industry veteran Bill Coughran, who joined Sequoia after eight years as a senior vice president of engineering at Google, will represent Sequoia on the Docker board. In addition to his vast industry experience, Coughran brings a deep understanding of the technical underpinnings of Docker and containers, which are emerging as critical components of web-scale infrastructure systems.

“Big businesses are being built by making accessible to all the transformative technologies championed by web-scale companies, and Docker is one of the most promising leaders of this movement,” said Coughran. “The velocity at which the Docker team has innovated on product and grown its community is staggering – in 18 months they've accomplished what many leading companies take years to build.”

“We are thrilled to have a firm like Sequoia – and an individual like Bill Coughran – join our team,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “This new partnership provides Docker with an unrivaled venture team and the resources to drive our vision for distributed applications. It’s a testament to the community and ecosystem that have helped Docker reach this important milestone.”