Isovalent announced it has closed a $40M Series B funding round led by Thomvest Ventures. M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund) and Grafana Labs joined Google and Cisco as existing strategic investors in the company, highlighting the central position that Isovalent occupies in the eBPF and broader cloud native ecosystem. Additional investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Mango Capital, and Mirae Asset Capital.
Isovalent is the creator of the Cilium project and provider of Isovalent Cilium Enterprise. Cilium has become the de-facto standard for secure and observable cloud native connectivity and has been selected as the default in several managed Kubernetes offerings of major public cloud providers including Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Anthos, and Amazon EKS Anywhere. Platform engineering teams at major enterprises such as Adobe, Bell Canada, Capital One, Datadog, Palantir, IKEA, and Sky, are working with Isovalent to enable enterprise-grade connectivity in their cloud native environments, the statement said.
“Our customers are enterprises and telcos who are now past the ‘Day 1’ phase of Kubernetes. In the ‘Day 2’ phase, the fact that Kubernetes itself does not provide a networking layer with the security, observability, reliability, and performance needed by more mission critical workloads becomes a critical gap”, said Isovalent CEO Dan Wendlandt. “The rapid adoption of Cilium across many verticals including finance/payments, e-commerce/retail, insurance, telecommunications, government, data analytics, entertainment and many more, highlights that we are solving a critical piece of the puzzle for users as they take the next step on their Kubernetes journey.”
“As more and more customers are succeeding with Kubernetes on top of Azure, we see a strong demand for advanced networking & security use cases. eBPF and Cilium are leading open source technologies for scalable & secure connectivity in Kubernetes”, said Deepak Bansal, Corporate VP, Azure Core Engineering. “Isovalent is leading the open source communities driving these technologies. Through this relationship between Azure Networking and Isovalent, we will bring the best eBPF and Cilium experience and integration to our customers.”
Since its introduction in 2018, Cilium has experienced explosive adoption as an eBPF-enabled technology. With 463 contributors, 12.8K GitHub stars, and over 12K members in the community Slack, Cilium is the one of the fastest growing cloud native connectivity projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem. It stands alone as the only container network interface (CNI) at the incubation level in the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), with full Graduated project status targeted for the first half of 2023.
“eBPF and Cilium are critical technologies in a new infrastructure layer that is emerging. The focal point of networking and security has shifted, initially from hardware boxes to software hypervisors, and now into the Linux kernel”, said Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) pioneer Nicira, acquired by VMware in 2012 for $1.26B. “With this new layer, connectivity, firewalling, load-balancing, and network monitoring are handled within the Linux kernel itself, allowing for much richer context for both security and observability, and ensuring consistent visibility and control across all types of underlying cloud infrastructure. Isovalent is uniquely well-positioned to be the leading company for this critical new layer.”
“In the past year, many startups and large vendors have started to understand the massive potential of eBPF,” said Umesh Padval, Partner at Thomvest Ventures, “but Dan, Thomas and the Isovalent team were years ahead of everyone else. Their technical vision, combined with a deep understanding of how to build successful open source communities, has meant that leading enterprises as well as all the major cloud providers are standardizing around Cilium. Isovalent has the rare opportunity to lead the creation of a fundamentally new and incredibly strategic layer in the enterprise infrastructure stack, and we are thrilled to be part of that journey.”
