ClusterHQ, the innovative Bristol-based company pioneering cutting-edge technology used by software developers, has raised £8m from two US tech funds to recruit more staff and place its products on the world stage.
ClusterHQ, formerly called HybridCluster and once described as among the most exciting to come out of Bristol for years, is developing containers – tools used to develop and manage services such as databases at the heart of most applications – from its base in Temple Quay and a sister office in California’s Silicon Valley.
Containers have taken the enterprise IT industry by storm in recent months, with the market leading platform going from under 3m downloads to more than 100m in six months.
ClusterHQ, which emerged from Bristol’s world-class SETsquared tech incubator and now employs 17 staff, says its products build on and extend the benefits of the market leader, giving developers features such as disaster recovery, failover, live migration and backup.
The new funding round – the largest investment in the rapidly-expanding container ecosystem to date – was led by Accel Partners London, with participation from Canaan Partners as well as existing investors.
ClusterHQ will use the funds to expand technical and go-to-market resources to help organisations use containers in production.
The firm, co-founded by Luke Marsden and Rob Haswell in Bristol, has five years’ experience solving data problems for container-based applications. Its Flocker product is used for databases, queues and key-value stores that underpin modern microservices architectures.
Flocker lets organisations run their data-backed services in containers without losing the operational management features that they have enjoyed with virtual machines for the past decade.
Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. It has invested in more than 300 successful companies including Facebook and Angry Birds firm Rovio from its offices in Palo Alto, New York City, London and Bangalore
Fueling the next level of growth means providing tools for managing stateful services such as databases, which are at the heart of most applications. ClusterHQ will address the essential operational requirements of enterprise IT – high availability, disaster recovery, failover, live migration and backup for these services.
Kevin Comolli, partner at Accel Partners, who is be joining the company’s board, said: “Having closely followed the evolving needs of enterprise IT organisations, we believe that enterprise adoption of container technology will be greatly accelerated when containerization offers the same data management and protection solutions that enterprise IT organizations have come to expect from virtualization.
“ClusterHQ is uniquely positioned to deliver these solutions, modernized for a container-based world.”
ClusterHQ recently added storage industry veteran and Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur Mark Davis as CEO to help drive its leadership in the market for managing containers.
Canaan Partners is headquartered in Menlo Park, California with offices in New York City, and Westport, Connecticut.
General partner Maha Ibrahim, said: “As an investor in Mark’s previous company, from its founding through the strategic acquisition by VMware, Canaan Partners has seen the enormous value created by flexible storage for modern applications,” said “We are excited to support ClusterHQ as it delivers powerful enterprise storage into the new world of containers, DevOps and microservices.”
Mark will expand ClusterHQ’s San Francisco Bay Area headquarters to complement the company’s Bristol-based development team.
Among early stage investors in ClusterHQ were established industry figures such as former VP of engineering at Rackspace Cloud Jason Seats, veteran Bristol tech innovator Charles Grimsdale, now partner at Eden Ventures and former CEO and founder of music download pioneers OD2, former head of corporate development at Google EMEA Anil Hansjee, and Toivo Annus, former head of engineering at Skype.
Pictured: The ClusterHQ team, from left, Adam Dangoor, Luke Marsden, Richard Wall, Rob Haswell, Dave Gebler
