Docker raises $105M to enhance support for developers

Today, Docker announced that it had raised $105 million as part of a Series C funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The new investment brings the company’s total funding to $163 million and increases the value of the company to $2.1 billion.  

Docker’s new funding will enable the organization to invest in innovating new solutions to support developer productivity to make it easier for users to develop Kubernetes applications. 

The organization’s flagship solution has long dominated the container market, with Docker Business offering developers the ability to build, share, and run applications on any cloud platform, in multiple languages and frameworks. 

For enterprises and technical decision makers, Docker has provided a solution they can use to support developers throughout the development process to build and secure applications quickly. 

Optimizing developer productivity 

The news comes as developer productivity remains held back by inefficient and outdated processes, with the average developer reporting they spend more than 15 hours a week on tasks outside of writing app code including maintaining internal tooling, setting up development environments, debugging pipelines, and waiting for build or test results.

Docker aims to address some of these challenges by making the development process more orchestrated and streamlined for developers, so they can spend more time creating and less time on administrative tasks, therefore decreasing the time needed to get products to market. 

“Developing apps today requires so much more than writing code. Multiple languages, frameworks, architectures, and discontinuous interfaces between tools for each lifecycle stage creates enormous complexity,” said Matt Carter, VP of marketing at Docker.

“Docker simplifies and accelerates developer workflow, while giving developers the freedom to innovate with their choice of tools, application stacks and deployment environments for each project,” Carter said. 

It’s an approach that the organization says have delivered substantial returns for developers. 

“Using Docker development teams release 13 times more frequently, ramp productivity with new technologies in 65% less time, and compress the mean-time-to-remediation (MTTR) of security vulnerabilities by 62% than without Docker,” Carter said. 

The container market from above 

Docker is perhaps the biggest name in the application container market, which researchers anticipate will reach $4.98 billion by 2023 as organizations modernize their business-critical applications and the overall number of applications used increases. 

The organization is competing against a number of other tools, including open source project Podman, a container engine that developers can use to develop, manage and run OCI containers on Linux systems. 

Another is containerd, a container run time tool that’s available as a daemon on Windows and Linux that’s used by organizations including Docker, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, CloudFoundry, Amazon EKS and AWS Fargate. 

However, Carter argues that Docker’s position in the market as an end-to-end application container provider is unrivaled. 

“No offering provides the end-to-end support for developers who want to build ship and run applications as they do with Docker Business,” Carter said. “The only similar tool to Docker Desktop is minikube, a part of the Kubernetes project, which allows users to run Kubernetes on a macOS, Linux, or Windows desktop.”