Lightbend Secures $25 Million to Deploy New Cloud-Native Applications

By Cloud Computing Outlook | Tuesday, May 26, 2020

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

Fremont, CA: Lightbend, the leader in Reactive Architecture and creator of the popular cloud-native platform Akka, closed a $25 million financing round led by Dell Technologies Capital. With participation from previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, and Shasta Ventures, the company has raised more than $85 million in funding to date. As part of the deal, Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, will join the Lightbend board of directors soon.

"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," said Jewell. "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."

According to investment bank Goldman Sachs, by 2021, the containerization of enterprise environments will become a $7 billion market opportunity. Three-quarters of that budget will be for deploying new applications enabled by containers, especially cloud-native applications. Today's digital-first enterprises require cloud-native applications that can seamlessly integrate into a company's infrastructure. Lightbend's cloud-native application platform enables developers to meet the growing demand for applications that optimize resource consumption and scale dynamically by leveraging Kubernetes, microservices, and containers.

Lightbend is headquartered in San Francisco and maintains offices in New York, Atlanta, Quebec, Switzerland, and Sweden. Co-founder Jonas Boner is the original author of the Reactive Manifesto movement and created Akka, the most popular abstraction method for managing state and scale across serverless deployments. Used by more than one million developers at companies such as Capital One, Fortnite, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Verizon, Akka helps its users handle billions of transactions at massive scale in their cloud-native systems.

"The rise of serverless, Reactive systems and real-time streaming data pipelines mean wholesale changes in how organizations and systems work with software," said Mark Brewer, CEO, Lightbend. "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."