San Francisco, CA – March 14, 2019 – Buoyant, creator of the popular open source service mesh Linkerd, today announced that GV (formerly Google Ventures) and existing investors Benchmark and A.Capital have invested $10 million to further Linkerd’s disruption of industry heavyweights in the service mesh space. This investment will be used to further propel Linkerd’s feature velocity and community growth, and brings the total amount raised by Buoyant to over $24 million.

“Linkerd’s widely-used service mesh is multiplatform, ultrafast, and proven at scale,” said Dave Munichiello, General Partner at GV. “The project’s focus on simplicity, speed, and scale has driven rapid adoption among both startups and large enterprises. We’ve been impressed by Buoyant’s execution to date and are excited to help as they enter their next phase of growth.”

Linkerd, created in 2016, is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) alongside other popular projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus. Linkerd provides reliability, security, and observability at the platform layer, and powers the cloud-native infrastructure of companies around the globe like Chase Bank, BigCommerce, and HomeAway (Expedia).

“Linkerd is a critical component of our multi-cloud, highly scaled architecture,” said Mark Tyrrell, Principal Architect at HomeAway. “The Linkerd service mesh has allowed us to scale microservices and applications to handle incredibly high volumes of traffic in a way that’s secure against failures of individual machines, clusters, or even regions.”

Linkerd 2.0, a major rewrite of the project released in September 2018, dramatically improved performance, resource consumption, and overall simplicity of the problem. Linkerd 2.2.1, the latest version, was released in February 2019, provides features such as request-level load balancing, retries, “transparent” TLS encryption, and live monitoring of golden metrics such as success rate, request throughput, and latency distributions–all without requiring any code changes.

“Linkerd momentum has never been higher than it is now, in large part because of users who are frustrated by the complexity and big-vendor nature of other service mesh projects,” said William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and one of Linkerd’s creators. “Our focus with Linkerd is 100 percent on solving real problems and minimizing complexity, not on pushing a particular cloud provider agenda or building technology for technology’s sake.”

Last year, Buoyant was selected as a Cool Vendor in Application Architecture, Infrastructure and Integration by Gartner.

About Buoyant

Buoyant (buoyant.io) builds open source software for mission-critical applications. Founded in 2015 by senior Twitter infrastructure engineers William Morgan and Oliver Gould, Buoyant’s mission is to create a world where people can trust the technology they rely on, by giving everyone the power to build innovative, reliable, and secure software. Buoyant is based in San Francisco and is backed by Silicon Valley’s top investors, including A.Capital Ventures, #Angels, Benchmark, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, GV, SV Angel, Tuesday Capital, and the Webb Investment Network.

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Contact

To learn more about Buoyant, please visit buoyant.io or follow us on Twitter at @BuoyantIO. For press inquiries, please contact Kiersten Gaffney <kiersten@buoyant.io>

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