Today, Oliver and I are happy to announce that Buoyant has raised Series A financing from Benchmark Capital, with Peter Fenton joining the board of directors. (See full press release here)

Over the past year, Linkerd adoption has far exceeded anything we had hoped for. The service mesh approach has taken hold everywhere we look, from startups like Monzo and BigCommerce to household names like AOL and PayPal, to a couple amazing use cases we can’t even talk about. It’s incredibly humbling to see our little project journey from inception to production around the world.

This brings us to Benchmark. Since the very moment we met Peter, Eric, and the other Benchmark partners, it’s been clear that they share our long term vision for Buoyant and have a clear understanding of what it takes to build a highly successful open source business. Benchmark’s track record of investing in open source infrastructure companies such as Docker, Confluent, Hortonworks, and Cockroach speaks for itself. We’re humbled by the opportunity to join the ranks of these companies.

In addition to Benchmark, we asked one more group to participate and were lucky enough to have them say “yes”—our friends at #Angels, a female-led investment group of current and former Twitter executives. Oliver and I are proud to have worked alongside this group of rockstar tech leaders at Twitter, and we’re doubly proud to have April, Chloe, Jana, and Katie involved in Buoyant and to work alongside them once more.

Finally, we’re bolstered by the confidence of our seed investors A.Capital, SV Angel, Fuel Capital, Data Collective, and the Webb Investment Network, who also participated in this round. These smart and talented folks were with us through thick and thin over the past few years, and their continued faith is incredibly gratifying.

This is still just the beginning of the Buoyant story. Oliver, I, and the rest of the team are incredibly excited to show you some of the amazing things we’ve been working on. Stay tuned for lots more on the way!

One last note: later this month, we’re holding our first-ever Linkerd online community meeting. If you want to hear about the upcoming roadmap, ask questions, and voice your feature requests—please join us!

P.S. Now’s probably a great time to point out that we’re hiring!

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