Telstra Ventures Invests in Rancher! | SUSE Communities

Telstra Ventures Invests in Rancher!

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Today, we announced our $40M funding round led by Telstra Ventures. We have been working with Telstra as a customer for many years. When Telstra Ventures, who was familiar with Telstra’s success in using Rancher and Kubernetes, approached us for a potential funding round, it was a no-brainer. A leading telco like Telstra exemplifies Rancher’s vision to Run Kubernetes Everywhere. We believe Kubernetes will be the standard compute platform from data center and cloud to the edge, and our unique vision has driven the company’s success including doubling our customer base and achieving 169% revenue growth in 2019.

In tandem, Kubernetes and Rancher form an enterprise computing platform applicable to any organization seeking to deploy cloud native applications. The new funding will help us accelerate our pace of innovation and expand go-to-market initiatives across our entire enterprise customer base. For example, financial services companies are deploying AI and machine learning workloads on Kubernetes clusters. Retail giants are deploying k3s clusters in store locations. K3s is also powering the next generation of smart manufacturing platforms. Kubernetes is indeed going to be everywhere, and Rancher will manage them all.

Kubernetes will also be a vital technology underpinning for the next generation of 5G services, and Rancher has a long history working with telco operators and vendors to drive container and Kubernetes adoption. As early as in 2017, for example, the ONAP project standardized on Rancher Kubernetes. You can read more about that here). The experience working with early ONAP experts from Bell Mobility helped us form the conviction that Kubernetes and Container Network Functions (CNFs) will play a huge role in the next generation of telco infrastructure.

At Rancher we get to work with great customers, employees, and investors. We are very fortunate to have Steve Schmidt lead Telstra Venture’s investment into Rancher. Steve is one of the best technology investors I have ever met. Over the years Steve has always been generous with sharing his insights and connections from his prior successes like Box, DocuSign, Gitlab, Nginx, and VeloCloud. I look forward to working with Steve to build the next level of success for Rancher.