NGINX announced today that it has raised $43 million in venture capital as the company rides the surging wave of interest in cloud-based computing that uses microservices for application development.
NGINX announced today that it has raised $43 million in venture capital as the company rides the surging wave of interest in cloud-based computing that uses microservices for application development.
The funding round was led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity fund, bringing its fundraising total to $103 million. NGINX says it is now being used by more than 30 percent of Fortune 50 companies, and a total of 450 million websites.
“We’re excited to welcome Goldman Sachs as we believe they’re the right partner to support us in driving adoption of the NGINX Application Platform and extending our leadership in microservices enablement,” said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, in a statement. “In the last 18 months, NGINX has introduced six new technologies to the platform to accelerate the modernization of our customers’ application infrastructure. Goldman Sachs brings real world experience managing mission critical applications (both legacy and new), which will help us further accelerate our platform vision.”
Read more: How developers want to use Kubernetes and microservices to make the web faster, stable, and more open
With more and more critical systems running on the internet, developers have been rethinking the way large, bulky software applications are written.
Using technology like containers, they are instead breaking them into separate features or “microservices”, and placing them in containers which have all the necessary pieces for an application to run in one package. That allows the application to be moved across different platforms and operating systems without having to be rewritten, while making the overall system more stable.
Typically, they use an open-source tool called Kubernetes to manage deployment of microservices. Together, the development philosophy holds that breaking applications into smaller, self-contained units can significantly reduce costs and time needed to write, deploy, and manage each one.
NGINX makes a suite of tools to help enterprises in their drive toward this more to a modern architecture. While companies are becoming increasingly dependent on the internet for their business, NGINX notes that it can still be a slow and cumbersome process to modernize their applications so they become more reliable for customers.
The company says it will use the new funding for further development of its products and to expand its network of partners. It also is planning a more aggressive international expansion, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region.
