Mesosphere raises $36 million to accelerate the roll out of world’s 'first' data centre operating system

Mesosphere, creators of the world’s first datacentre operating system, has raised $36 million in Series B funding. New investor Khosla Ventures led the round, with additional investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and others.

“The industry needs a new type of operating system to optimise and automate the complex landscape inherent to the agile IT era: a growing fleet of distributed web, mobile, analytic server applications, operated as application-centric abstractions on commodity server and storage pools in dedicated datacentres and public clouds,” said Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. “In this environment, existing virtualisation or orchestration software are insufficient to deliver on the end goals: abstract complexity, optimise utilisation, and simplify or eliminate human intervention in the face of dynamic failures, demand surges, constant provisioning and upgrades. Mesosphere has assembled a world-class team to deliver this software foundation that makes it as easy to run massive distributed server applications as it is to run an app on your smartphone or PC.”

The B round brings Mesosphere’s total funding to approximately $50 million and the company plans to accelerate investment in global growth as it rolls out the world’s first datacentre operating system. With a DCOS, developers and operators no longer need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines but can easily build and deploy applications and services that span entire datacentres. This DCOS approach to programmable datacentres -- managing datacentres and clouds at web scale -- has helped drive the success of Internet giants like Google and Twitter, as well as the hyper-growth of young companies like Airbnb and Hubspot.

Mesosphere’s DCOS, built on Apache Mesos, provides developers an API to automate allocation and deallocation of datacentre resources to run today’s most popular distributed applications, like Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra and Google’s Kubernetes (all natively supported by Mesosphere DCOS). A software development kit (SDK) aids quickly building applications that scale with built-in high availability and fault tolerance. The Mesosphere DCOS supports Linux applications and runs with Amazon AWS, Google GCE, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, VMware vCloud Air. The Mesosphere DCOS also runs on-premise on bare metal or on top of a virtualised private cloud, such as with VMware or OpenStack.

"Today's applications and services have outgrown single servers,” said Florian Leibert, CEO and co-founder of Mesosphere. "The datacentre needs an operating system. The Mesosphere DCOS automates common operations and makes your entire datacentre programmable. We want to give developers the power of the underlying resources without forcing them to worry about the complexity of spanning hundreds or even thousands of machines. We are making modern, distributed systems as easy to build and operate as if they were running on a single machine.”