Tetrate, the company born out of Istio’s open source app networking project, raises $40 million

Tetrate, the company commercializing an open source networking project that allows for easier data sharing across different applications, has raised $40 million.

The round, led by Sapphire Ventures underscores the importance of the Istio project and just how critical services that facilitate cross-platform data sharing have become.

Sapphire was joined by other new investors including Scale Venture Partners and NTTVC, along with existing investors, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, 8VC, and Samsung NEXT.

The company said it would use the cash to further develop its hybrid cloud application networking platform and support a new product, based on Istio, that makes the application service mesh easier to use, according to a statement from the company. Geographic expansion to Latin America, Europe and Asia is also on the menu now that it has 40 million simoleons to play around with (personally I'd have converted all that money into bills and gone swimming in it like Scrooge McDuck).

As the microservices revolution picks up steam, it's indispensable to use Istio for managing applications built with microservices and deployed on containers. Both the product and background of the founding team lead us to believe that Tetrate is poised to bring Istio into the mainstream for enterprises by making it easy to manage and deploy on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments," said Jai Das, the partner, president and co-founder of Sapphire's multi-billion dollar firm, who's joining the Tetrate board. The applications we use daily require a lot of work in the background, and Tetrate helps make that happen with its Istio-based service mesh technology, which helps route traffic between microservices, add visibility and enhance security."

Founded in 2018, Tetrate formally launched in 2019 with a $12.5 million round that boosted the company's profile and helped the company commercialize and professionalize services around the Istio and Envoy Proxy open source projects.

Tetrate nets $12.5 million to bring microservices to the corporate masses

Tons of really big customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense use Tetrate's services currently. In the military, Tetrate powers the DevSecOps platform called Platform One.

We partnered with Tetrate to help secure and smoothly operate Platform One with Istio. Platform One works with the most critical systems across the DoD. The Tetrate team has provided world class expertise, trained our team members, reviewed our platform architecture and configurations, and helped with debugging and upgrades," said Nicolas Chaillan, the chief software officer for the US Air Force, in a statement. We're getting excellent production support for running our platform smoothly and we rely on them and their platform for a critical layer of our stack."