Joyent, Inc., the container infrastructure company, today announced that it raised $15 million in funding to accelerate the adoption of application containers in the enterprise. Existing investors Intel Capital, Orascom TMT Investments, El Dorado Ventures, EPIC Ventures, LGI Ventures and others participated in the round.

Application containers allow developers and system administrators to build portable applications that can be deployed virtually anywhere. Unlike virtual machines, which require a dedicated operating system for each instance, application containers leverage OS virtualization to run directly on hardware, resulting in streamlined, efficient infrastructure. Though container-mania only surfaced widely in the past year thanks to Docker and its emerging ecosystem, Joyent has championed container-based, OS-level virtualization as a founding principle of its technology stack since 2005.

Today Joyent's customers run their mission-critical applications across thousands of infrastructure containers in the Joyent Public Cloud and some of the world's most recognizable companies leverage Joyent's private cloud software solution, SmartDataCenter, to manage their internal, container-based private clouds.

'Our customers are rapidly adopting Docker to create application containers, and they are seeking to use this new technology on Joyent's proven infrastructure containers,' said Scott Hammond, CEO, Joyent. 'We believe that this specific combination of application containers and infrastructure containers will completely disrupt the data center and transform how business applications are built and delivered. This recent round of funding will enable us to aggressively build out our integration and support for Docker.'

'Just as virtual machines replaced individual servers, we believe there will be another ten-to-one consolidation in the data center thanks to containers,' said Bryan Cantrill, CTO, Joyent. 'For Joyent, this is not a new belief; we have nearly a decade of experience running infrastructure containers securely in production -- and we now have the opportunity to apply that hard-won expertise by helping enterprises understand how to build, deploy and orchestrate their mission-critical application containers with enterprise-grade security, performance and efficiency.'

'Joyent has always seen the world differently,' said Charles Beeler, partner at El Dorado Ventures. 'From the beginning Joyent set out to solve some of the biggest problems in cloud computing through the lens of the developer. Their solutions aren't iterative; they are built from the start specifically to address the biggest pain points of today's developers. Containers will transform the data center, but they'll also completely change the way developers work.'

About Joyent
Joyent is the high-performance container infrastructure company for public and private clouds. We have the only production-grade stack proven to deliver bare metal performance, security, persistence, enterprise-grade networking, and web-scale economics to run Docker containers. Joyent is the steward of Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript project that provides developers and enterprises with the most powerful runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps. For more information visit http://www.joyent.com/.