Diagrid Emerges from Stealth with $24.2 Million in Funding, Launches Fully Managed Dapr for Kubernetes New service enables development teams to confidently operate Dapr in production
Seattle, WA
|
October 12, 2022 09:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Diagrid, a startup that helps developers simplify and de-risk distributed systems, today announced it raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Amplify Partners and Quiet Capital. This funding follows the company’s $4.2 million seed round led by Amplify Partners. The company’s first product - Diagrid Conductor - is also now available at www.diagrid.io.
Diagrid will use the funding to invest in serving the open source community and to build a suite of commercial tools and services that unlock the productivity of engineering teams.
“There are five million Kubernetes developers in the world, and Dapr combined with Diagrid Conductor enables millions more to harness the potential of distributed systems and build on Kubernetes,” said Dave Zilberman, General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Diagrid founders Mark Fussell and Yaron Schneider are distributed system visionaries with proven dedication to the open source software ecosystem, having previously co-created Azure Service Fabric and KEDA, respectively. We are honored to lead Diagrid’s Series A to help it democratize software development and further support its thriving developer community.”
Diagrid Conductor is a fully managed Dapr platform for Kubernetes which reduces the operational burden of managing Dapr, giving developers deep insights into their applications and informing them of production best practices, while increasing service reliability and security. Diagrid was founded by the creators of Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), which are both Cloud Native Computing Foundation open source projects.
“We are in the midst of a generational shift to distributed applications, but software developers are having difficulty keeping up,” said Mark Fussell, Diagrid co-founder and CEO. “Distributed apps are made possible by microservice architectures, but they require so much plumbing code that developers are overloaded. That’s why, while at Microsoft, we created Dapr which reduces developer time building solutions by up to 50 percent. But we continued to hear that it’s hard to manage Dapr on Kubernetes—the basis of software development today—so today we're launching Diagrid Conductor to solve this and make it easy to manage Dapr on Kubernetes.”
Dapr increases the productivity of developers, enabling them to build portable and reliable distributed applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It’s widely adopted with more than 2200 contributors, 4700 Discord members, and 19,450 Github stars. Dapr deploys a control plane to manage the data plane sidecars. This requires Kubernetes operators to upgrade and monitor the Dapr control plane and understand the nuances of managing it effectively, including improving its reliability.
“The IBM Accelerated Discovery team has integrated Dapr and Diagrid Conductor into the heart of a new platform for accelerated science, bringing together serverless, cross-cloud computing with novel computing resources, including quantum-inspired simulation and generative and surrogate model AI techniques,“ said Karl Wehden, IBM Research product director. ”Dapr and Diagrid move IBM's Discovery Platform past the deployment and operations concerns inherent in Kubernetes, to simple and elegant repeatability, portability, and speed required to drive the demanding workloads that define acceleration in modern computational scientific discovery.”
Industry Support for Commercializing Developer-Friendly Tools
While in stealth, Diagrid received support and investment from a roster of notable enterprise leaders who are all too familiar with the challenges of bringing business applications to market. Early backers include Joe Beda (Kubernetes Co-Founder, Founder/CTO at Heptio), Matt Klein (creator of Envoy, Lyft), William Morgan (CEO of Buoyant, creator of Linkerd), Mark Russinovich (CTO of Microsoft Azure), Adam Gross (Former CEO of Heroku), Sri Viswanath (former CTO of Atlassian), Seth Vargo (staff engineer at Google), Kris Nova, Adam Frankl (developer marketing advisor for Neo4J, JFrog, and Sourcegraph), and Roopak Venkatakrishnan (director of engineering at Bolt).
“Cloud-based, microservices architectures have imposed real costs on engineering teams where developers have to become infrastructure wranglers and distributed systems theorists just to deploy a simple app,” said Lenny Pruss, General Partner at Amplify Partners and Diagrid Board Member. “Dapr open source and the commercial solutions built by Diagrid strike at the heart of this problem, providing a set of developer-friendly tools and APIs that abstract away much of the distributed system complexity, thereby allowing engineering teams to focus on what matters: their business applications.”
About Diagrid:
Diagrid’s mission is to boost developer productivity building applications based on open source technologies such as Dapr and KEDA, particularly those focused on cloud native and microservice architectures. Diagrid provides developers with productive tools and APIs so developers can concentrate on what matters: their business. For more information, go to https://www.diagrid.io, follow on Twitter @diagridio, or check out the Dapr community on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/ptHhX6jc34).
Contact Details
Forrest Carman
+1 206-859-3118
Company Website
