INSIGHTS / News

Engine Shed member and SETsquared company, ClusterHQ, today announced that it has closed an £8 million ($12 million) Series A funding round led by Accel Partners, 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 container technology in production. The funding represents the largest Series A investment in the container ecosystem to date.

ClusterHQ, a SETsquared company since 2011, is a software company at the heart of the container-based virtualization revolution that is shaking up enterprise IT.

Most businesses nowadays, whether they are tiny startups or big established enterprises, have to be able to build and run software faster in order to not get left behind by their competition. Speed is not a choice, it is an imperative.

The reason that the Docker container platform, the most popular way of using container-based virtualization, is taking off like nothing enterprise software has ever seen before is that containers enable companies to build higher quality software, faster.  Because of this monumental shift in development, container growth is exploding.  One measure of this growth is that Docker’s container platform went from under 3 million downloads in June 2014 to 67 million in November 2014.

But there is a problem. Containers don’t handle data very well. This means that databases, the heart of every application, can’t run in containers without significant engineering resources. ClusterHQ’s mission is to make it possible for companies of all sizes to run their mission-critical data services inside containers.

ClusterHQ has been a member of the Bristol SETsquared Centre since 2011 when Luke Marsden founded the business. The company has grown to over 15 employees across the UK and the US.  Nick Sturge, SETsquared Centre Director, commented: “It has been a pleasure and privilege to host Luke and his team for the last few years and now that they are going to recruit so heavily in Bristol, they will be moving out of the Centre and we look forward to supporting them as SETsquared Alumni members and as a fully fledged tech business in the burgeoning Bristol & Bath tech cluster. This brings the total investment raised by Bristol SETsquared Companies, to £168m since 2007.”