Mesosphere的7350万美元融资支持其在Mesos数据中心操作系统上的赌注

做的是什么生意

Mesosphere sells a commercial data-center operating system built on Apache Mesos: an enterprise edition, with a free community version, that runs, schedules and monitors containers plus Hadoop, Spark and databases across all of a company's servers and public clouds.

启动资金：A $36 million round announced the previous December (per VentureBeat's April 2015 report), then the $73.5 million Series C announced 2016-03-24, led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise with Microsoft participating.

起因

Mesosphere was founded in 2013 in San Francisco on a premise it first talked about publicly months later: an operating system for every server in a data center, or across the servers a company uses in a public cloud. Its stack was built on Apache Mesos, the open-source cluster manager. In April 2015 the company began accepting applications for early access to its data center operating system, pairing a free community edition with a premium enterprise edition, and announced that Google's Kubernetes was fully integrated with the platform, with Google an ally since the prior year.

经过

Growth capital preceded the 2016 wave: VentureBeat's April 2015 report noted a $36 million round announced the previous December. On 2016-03-24 Mesosphere announced a $73.5 million Series C led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise with Microsoft participating; A Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, Khosla Ventures and Triangle Peak Partners also joined. The same day it released Marathon 1.0, the open-source software for managing containers on top of Mesos, and launched Velocity, a continuous-integration and continuous-delivery product built on Marathon that integrates with the open-source Jenkins CI tool. Marathon was already part of Microsoft's recently launched Azure Container Service for deploying container-based applications on Azure. Mesosphere said eBay and other major companies already ran massive CI/CD environments built on Mesos, Jenkins, Docker and related tools, and positioned Velocity as bringing those capabilities to every type of company; a spokesperson put its customer count at more than three dozen.

结果

As of the 2016-03-24 announcement Mesosphere was scaling: it had closed the $73.5M Series C, shipped Marathon 1.0, launched Velocity and counted more than three dozen customers, with the sources recording no later milestone.

可借鉴之处

最广泛的赌注——“数据中心操作系统”——仍然依赖于分销：Azure和HPE验证了Marathon，而开放核心的经济性（是否有足够多的客户付费？）仍是决定性问题。