Alexandria-based greymatter.io announced Thursday that it raised $7.1 million for its microservices platform, which provides service mesh and API management for enterprise-scale IT environments.
Greymatter.io CEO Chris Holmes founded the company in 2015 in response to customers on closed networks that wanted to migrate their applications from their bare-metal system to the cloud.
“If a large enterprise is going to have assets in many different places — cloud, Kubernetes, containers, not containers, virtual machines, old data centers that are sitting in closets, potentially computers sitting on trucks — there needs to be an application network that bridges all those together in a very secure fashion that also reports intelligence insights up to the users ... and down to the engineers who are potentially managing an application — or 100 of them — and parts of the application were running on a virtual machine and parts of the application were running on cloud,” he said.
Holmes said the funding will go toward growing the company’s 51-person staff by about 15 or 20 people this year. Among the new hires will be sales staff, which the company has never had before.
Most of greymatter.io’s clients are in the public sector, the defense industry and the aerospace industry. Holmes said the sales staff is needed to respond to interest from Fortune 100 companies.
The service mesh market is growing to support the complexities introduced by service-based architectures. Analysts at Global Info Research expect the global service mesh market to grow from $225.9 million last year to $2.3 billion in the next six years.
Back in 2015, though, Holmes said the service mesh market didn’t even exist, which made it difficult to explain to people. When Istio and Kubernetes became popular, Holmes said it became easier to explain how their platform helps large organizations address governance, analytic and zero-trust security needs, regardless of the number of clouds, on-premise systems, applications or endpoints involved.
The Series A round was led by Elsewhere Partners. Chris Pacitti, founder and partner of Elsewhere Partners, said in a statement that greymatter.io has proven the strength and scalability of its platform over the years.
“Organizations are quickly realizing that they must future-proof their IT infrastructures,” he said. “The distribution of software, APIs, data and users across hybrid, multi-cloud and on-premise systems has created dramatically more complex networks that large organizations — both public and private — are struggling to control, secure and monitor.”
