Lightbend, the leader in Reactive Architecture and creator of the popular cloud-native platform Akka, today announced the close of a $25 million financing round led by Dell Technologies Capital. Previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, and Shasta Ventures also participated. To date, the company has raised more than $85 million in funding. Tyler Jewell, a Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, joins the Lightbend board of directors and discusses why he led the investment in Lightbend here.

"As a pioneer in the concepts of Reactive programming a decade ago, Lightbend has been extraordinarily prescient and has built some of the most flexible and advanced frameworks and runtimes for cloud native computing on the market today," said Jewell. "Their industry vision aligns with Dell Technologies Capital's view of the future. Lightbend is well positioned to take advantage of two key trends that will dramatically change the enterprise computing landscape - they are the leader in Reactive architecture and enable serverless computing in a way unmatched by other vendors."

According to investment bank Goldman Sachs, by 2021 the containerization of enterprise environments will become a $7 billion market opportunity. Three-quarters of that budget will be for deploying new applications enabled by containers, especially cloud-native applications. Today's digital-first enterprises require cloud-native applications that can seamlessly integrate into a company's infrastructure. Lightbend's cloud-native application platform helps developers meet the growing demand for applications that optimize resource consumption and scale dynamically by leveraging Kubernetes, microservices, and containers.

Lightbend co-founder Jonas Bonér is the original author of the Reactive Manifesto movement and created Akka, the most popular abstraction method for managing state and scale across serverless deployments. Used by more than one million developers at companies such as Capital One, Fortnite, LinkedIn, PayPal and Verizon, Akka helps its users handle billions of transactions at massive scale in their cloud-native systems. Lightbend is also the company behind OSS application frameworks Play and Lagom, streaming data pipelines framework Cloudflow, the next-generation serverless project Cloudstate and the Scala programming language.

"The rise of serverless, Reactive systems, and real-time streaming data pipelines mean wholesale changes in how organizations and systems work with software," said Mark Brewer, CEO, Lightbend. "This funding from Dell Technologies Capital solidifies our plans to take advantage of this market opportunity, remaining cash flow positive while further scaling our business. As the founding member of the newly-established Reactive Foundation, we look forward to helping empower developers within the Kubernetes ecosystem and beyond, and bringing our vision for Reactive architecture to developers worldwide."

Lightbend is headquartered in San Francisco and maintains offices in New York, Atlanta, Quebec, Switzerland, and Sweden. For more information visit www.lightbend.com.

About Dell Technologies Capital
Dell Technologies Capital is the global venture capital investment arm of Dell Technologies. The investment team backs passionate early stage founders who push the envelope on technology innovation for enterprises. Since inception in 2012, the team has sustained an investment pace of $150 million a year and has invested in more than 100 startups, 40 of which have been acquired and 5 have gone public. Portfolio companies also gain unique access to the go-to-market capabilities of Dell Technologies (Dell, Dell EMC, VMWare, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks). Notable investments include Adallom, Arista Networks, Cylance, Docusign, Graphcore, JFrog, MongoDB, Netskope, Nutanix, RedLock, RiskRecon, TwistLock, Wavefront and Zscaler. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Dell Technologies Capital has offices in Boston, Austin, and Israel. For more information visit www.delltechcapital.com.

About Lightbend
Lightbend (@Lightbend) is leading the enterprise transformation toward real-time, cloud-native applications. Lightbend provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructure like Red Hat OpenShift. The most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with Lightbend, engaging billions of users every day through software that is changing the world. For more information, visit www.lightbend.com.