Battery Ventures is a investment firm that focuses on technology. It invests in potentially, category-defining businesses in markets including application software, IT infrastructure technologies, consumer-internet and mobile services, and industrial technologies.

Battery Ventures

Vertex Ventures is a global network of operator-investors who manage portfolios in the U.S., China, Israel, India and Southeast Asia. The firm is a trusted partner to some of the world’s most innovative entrepreneurs, supporting them with unmatched operating experience and deep access to the capital, talent, partners and customers they need to build truly global businesses.

Vertex Ventures

We're a team of founders and operators turned investors who lead/co-lead investment rounds at the Seed and Series A. We stick to the categories we know best: software infrastructure, developer tools, data, security, and vertical SaaS. We’re fans of open-source software and excited by recent advances in AI.

Vertex Ventures US

Nexus Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that helps founders build product-focused companies. The firm actively partners with founders at inception, seed, or series-A stages and stays involved throughout the company's growth. With $2.6 billion in capital, Nexus invests mainly in enterprise software in the US and digitally-driven businesses in India.

Nexus Venture Partners

Orkes

Orkes is a microservices and workflow orchestration platform that aims to provide a managed, cloud-hosted version of Conductor with tiered support. The company creates workflows across microservices using actionable insights and iterates on new features or fixes bugs using a visual representation, while also offering order management, cloud application ecosystem security scanning, data protection workflows, and telecom subscriber and billing management.

Orkes specializes in providing a microservices and workflow orchestration platform for cloud-native development.

Building future-ready applications in the cloud

Cloud-native Tech

Orkes: $20 Million Raised To Scale Distributed Systems

Orkes specializes in providing a microservices and workflow orchestration platform for cloud-native development.The company provides an enterprise-grade platform based on the open-source Conductor project originally developed by Netflix. Orkes focuses on enabling developers to code, debug, and scale applications faster through orchestration, addressing the complexities of managing distributed workflows, microservices, and events across various environments​​​​.Orkes has gained momentum from existing open-source users who trust the Conductor project and want it as a managed service. The company's approach to application building is considered innovative and modern, with a focus on creating complex, observable, and large-scale applications for enterprises. Key customers and partnershipsOrkes’ customers operate in various industries and sectors such as financial services, media &amp; entertainment, healthcare, and technology. Some notable customers include LinkedIn, Redfin, Tesla, VMware, J.P. Morgan Chase &amp; Co, Foxtel, United Wholesale Mortgage, and GE.Orkes provides its Orkes Cloud platform in AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure marketplaces.

SingleStore is a company that provides a distributed SQL database platform for real-time analytics and operational applications.SingleStore’s platform combines the scalability of NoSQL with the querying capabilities of SQL. It enables organizations to ingest, process, and analyze large volumes of data in real-time, making it ideal for applications that require fast and accurate data processing. SingleStore solves the problem of handling massive amounts of data and delivering real-time insights for use cases such as real-time analytics, operational analytics, and high-velocity transactional applications.SingleStore's competitive advantage is its ability to handle analytical and transactional workloads in a single platform. It allows businesses to consolidate their data infrastructure, simplifying management and reducing operational costs.SingleStore operates with a sales model that includes direct sales and partnerships with technology and solution providers. It offers different pricing and licensing options tailored to the needs of its customers, including subscription-based models.Key customers and partnershipsSingleStore serves some of the largest tech and non-tech enterprises across various industries, including Comcast, Cisco, Akamai Technologies, Fiverr, Goldman Sachs, Sony, Siemens, Hulu.SingleStore partners with all major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud) and has technology partnerships with Dell, Red Hat, Intel, HP Enterprise, and Looker.Funding and financialsAs of June 2023, SingleStore’s latest fundraising was in October 2022 from a USD 30 million Series F round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Prosperity7 Ventures. The funds were slated to fuel SingleStore’s growth and various strategic initiatives.

SingleStore

Platform9 is an open-distributed cloud company that offers solutions for managing hybrid clouds, Kubernetes, and more. Platform9 offers several products and solutions, including Managed Kubernetes, Managed OpenStack, and Managed Bare Metal.Managed Kubernetes allows businesses to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across any infrastructure, while Managed OpenStack offers a simplified way to deploy and manage private clouds. Managed Bare Metal enables businesses to run Kubernetes, OpenStack, and other workloads on dedicated hardware with bare-metal performance.Platform9 claims to deliver a seamless Kubernetes experience across any infrastructure. Platform9's SaaS-managed Kubernetes solution offers a single view to manage Kubernetes clusters running on any cloud or on-premises infrastructure, including bare metal servers, vSphere, and public clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure, providing customers with a unified Kubernetes experience. In addition, Platform9 offers automated security patching, on-demand upgrades, self-healing clusters, multi-version support, and audit logging.Platform9 has a subscription-based sales model. It offers its services on a pay-as-you-go basis, with pricing based on the number of managed nodes or instances, with optional add-ons for additional features and support.Key customers and partnershipsPlatform9 targets enterprise customers who run and manage Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies on distributed cloud services, whether on-premises or in the public cloud. Its customers typically include large organizations with complex IT environments, such as financial services, healthcare, technology, and retail companies.As of mid-2022, Platform9 catered to more than 60 enterprise clients and powered 40,000 nodes across private, public, and edge clouds.Platform9 has partnerships with various cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Additionally, in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/32723">August 2024</a>, Platform9 partnered with Fairwinds, a managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider, to tackle issues related to Kubernetes over-provisioning and cost management costs in public cloud deployments.

Platform9

Mirantis is a technology company that provides cloud-native software and services to help businesses modernize their IT infrastructure.Mirantis specializes in open-source software, focusing on Kubernetes, OpenStack, and related technologies. Its core offering is the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform, a managed Kubernetes service that provides a complete set of tools for deploying and managing containerized applications. The platform helps organizations adopt and scale Kubernetes quickly and easily, with features like automated provisioning, integrated monitoring, and self-service access to resources. Mirantis also offers professional services including consulting, training, and support for Kubernetes, OpenStack, and related technologies.Mirantis sells its products and services through a subscription-based model. Customers can choose from various annual subscription plans, depending on their needs.Key customers and partnershipsMirantis focuses on enterprise customers who deploy and manage large-scale private clouds. Some of its high-profile customers include Volkswagen Group, Société Générale, S&amp;P Global, Paypal, Volkswagen, and GSK.Mirantis also has technology partnerships with several companies, including Arm, Cisco, Entrust, and Fujitsu, and hardware vendors like Dell EMC, Intel, and Supermicro.

Mirantis

Rafay Systems is a cloud-native platform that automates deployment, life cycle management, and scaling of containerized applications across all cloud infrastructure.Rafay's platform provides enterprises with the tools to deploy and manage containerized applications, microservices, and serverless functions in a scalable and efficient way. The platform provides features including multi-cluster management, automated workload scaling, automated application recovery, and granular application-level access controls. Rafay also provides a Kubernetes-native API gateway that simplifies managing and securing microservices, and includes capabilities to include support for graphics processing unit-based workloads.Additionally, Rafay Systems <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/29580">offers an AI suite</a> to simplify AI application development and deployment. This suite includes pre-configured LLMOps Playgrounds, a turnkey MLOps pipeline, central management of LLM providers and prompts, and AI data source integrations and governance. It also offers a cost optimization suite to help IT professionals manage Kubernetes expenses with dynamic cluster scaling, auto-rightsizing, policy application, and simplified infrastructure.Rafay has a subscription-based sales model and offers its platform as a service. The pricing is based on the number of clusters, nodes per cluster, and the amount of data transferred.Key customers and partnershipsRafay’s target customer segments are enterprises, service providers, and software vendors. Some of its notable clients include Verizon, Equinix, Samsung, Moneygram, and the US Air Force.In 2022, Rafay launched its Technical Alliance Program (TAP), which brings together technology and solutions providers to develop joint solutions to simplify and streamline Kubernetes management and operations. Partners of the program include GitLab Inc., F5 NGINX, MinIO, New Relic, and Sysdig. Meanwhile, Rafay’s public cloud and managed Kubernetes partners include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle.

Rafay Systems

Docker, Inc. is a technology company developing productivity tools centered around Docker, a software container platform that automates the deployment of code inside containers.Docker, Inc's major commercial products include Docker Hub, a central repository for containers, and Docker Desktop, a GUI application that enables Windows and Mac users to manage containers.Docker's ease of use, portability, resource efficiency, scalability, and strong ecosystem has made it a popular solution for deploying and managing applications in various environments.Docker has a subscription-based sales model. Docker also collaborates with various channel partners, including technology resellers, system integrators, and value-added distributors to expand its reach.Moreover, Docker has made several strategic acquisitions to enhance its capabilities: AtomicJar (2023), Nestybox (2022), SocketPlane (2015), and Tutum (2015), among others.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the platform was used by more than 18 million developers. As of March 2022, the company served more than 56,000 commercial customers, including Adobe, Netflix, PayPal, Verizon, and Target.In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27771">March 2024</a>, Docker expanded its partnership with Red Hat to integrate Testcontainers Cloud into the Red Hat OpenShift platform. This partnership aimed to streamline the process of building cloud-native applications and facilitate real-world testing using Docker containers.Docker’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) was more than USD 50 million in 2021.

Docker

Vendors offering cloud-native infrastructure or provisioning, which is the first layer in the cloud-native landscape. It encompasses tools to create and harden the foundation of cloud-native apps.

Vendors offering execution environment (runtime) solutions. This encompasses everything a container needs to run in a cloud-native environment, including the code used to start a container.

Vendors offering solutions for application definition and development. This layer focuses on the tools that enable engineers to build cloud-native applications

Vendors offering orchestration and management solutions including tools to handle running and connecting cloud-native applications.

Vendors offering observability, including tools to understand a cloud system from its external outputs, measured by CPU time, memory, disk space, latency, errors, etc.

Vendors that bundle different tools from different layers together into a platform, solving a larger problem. These can include an orchestration tool, a container runtime, service discovery, networking, an API gateway, etc.

Provide tools to design and build applications for deployment and operation in cloud environments

Disruptors are using Generative AI for AI-based assistants and help-bots, while others provide the technology for developing and deploying Gen AI applications and models.

ANALYST_QUICK_TAKE

<div>
 Orkes, a startup that offers advanced microservices platforms that are based on the open-source project, Conductor, managed to secure USD 20 million through a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners. Other contributors included familiar investors like Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US.
 The startup plans to put the new capital inflow towards the continued support and maintenance of Conductor. There are also future efforts slated towards the launch of a Conductor Foundation, potentially in cooperation with a much larger foundation.
 The responsibility for Conductor's maintenance, initially developed by Netflix, was handed over to Orkes when Netflix ceased its support. Many companies, such as Tesla, United Wholesale Mortgage, and Foxtel, have come to rely on Conductor for managing their technological infrastructure. Moreover, Orkes also offers an AI orchestration platform built on Conductor and a fully managed Conductor on the cloud of choice for clients.
</div> Analyst QuickTake: 
 Orkes is a modern platform for orchestrating distributed business processes and integrating microservices, workflows, and events. It allows developers to manage complex applications across any programming language or framework, offering visual and code-based workflow modeling. Orkes supports scalable, cloud-native deployments across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and offers features for centralized governance and security. Its design aims to simplify the creation, execution, and scaling of applications, enhancing developer productivity and reducing operational costs​​​​​​.

Orkes

About EDGE

Contact Us

Resources

Area of Focus

Technology Research Made Effortless