Tetrate, Started by Istio Founders, Raises $40 Million to Help Enterprises With Cloud-Native Application Networking Platform

With Sapphire Ventures leading the round, Tetrate will accelerate global go-to-market and deliver a SaaS offering to enable easy consumption of Istio and Envoy

SAN FRANCISCO — March 10, 2021 — Tetrate announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures. Other new investors, Scale Venture Partners and NTTVC, and existing investors, Dell Technologies CapitalIntel Capital, 8VC, and Samsung NEXT, participated in the round. The Series B funding will be used to develop advanced capabilities within Tetrate Service Bridge, the only cloud-agnostic, hybrid cloud applications networking platform. Funding also will support a new SaaS offering: an Istio-based platform that makes the application service mesh easier to consume. Additionally, Tetrate will expand go-to-market activities in the Americas and initiate go-to-market teams in Europe and Asia.

Varun Talwar, CEO and co-founder of Tetrate, is the co-creator of Istio and gRPC. He started Tetrate with Jeyappragash (JJ) Jeyakeerthi, who previously led Twitter’s Cloud Infrastructure Management Platform. Jai Das, Sapphire Ventures President and Partner, will join Tetrate’s Board of Directors. “We’re excited to have Sapphire’s support and Jai’s membership on our board,” said Talwar. “Jai’s experience will be invaluable as we take Tetrate to the next level of growth and success.” Talwar called the funding round a “major milestone for Tetrate — capping off a record year where we’ve doubled our team and had a 10x increase in customer base and  revenue.”

“Sapphire Ventures is thrilled to back Tetrate, the company behind enterprise Istio and Envoy,” said Das. “As the microservices revolution picks up steam, it’s indispensable to use Istio for managing applications built with microservices and deployed on containers. Both the product and background of the founding team lead us to believe that Tetrate is poised to bring Istio into the mainstream for enterprises by making it easy to manage and deploy on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. The applications we use daily require a lot of work in the background, and Tetrate helps make that happen with its Istio-based service mesh technology, which helps route traffic between microservices, add visibility and enhance security.”

Rapid Expansion and Service Mesh Leadership        

Formed in 2018, Tetrate’s $12.5 million Series A funding round in March 2019 enabled the company to rapidly expand its open source leadership and deepen its contributions to the open source community. Today, Tetrate is one of the largest contributors to the Istio open source project and second largest to Envoy Proxy.

Adopted by customers including Fortune 200 financial services, telco, retail, media, and US federal government organizations, Tetrate is the only platform-neutral and cloud-neutral company to provide commercial support for Istio — also building a service mesh platform that’s based on Istio and Envoy. Tetrate partnered with NIST to define service mesh security standards and to implement NIST’s authorization framework, Next Generation Access Control.

Customers Modernize for Operational Efficiency   

Service mesh adoption is expected to steadily increase as enterprises and governments expand microservices architecture across their systems. Customers have leveraged Tetrate’s solutions to meet critical infrastructure needs across multiple on-premises and cloud deployments.

US Department of Defense (DoD)

“We partnered with Tetrate to help secure and smoothly operate Platform One with Istio. Platform One works with the most critical systems across the DoD. The Tetrate team has provided world-class expertise, trained our team members, reviewed our platform architecture and configurations, and helped with debugging and upgrades. We’re getting excellent production support for running our platform smoothly, and we rely on them and their platform for a critical layer of our stack.” — Nicolas Chaillan, Chief Software Officer, US Air Force

FICO  

“Tetrate, via Istio and their platform, has enabled end-to-end encryption and PCI compliance for our AWS EKS workloads and also helped improve our operational efficiency.” — Jeet Kaul, VP Engineering, FICO

Square 

“Square’s infrastructure relies heavily on best-of-breed open source service mesh technologies Envoy and Istio that are fast becoming de facto standards.  We rely on these both in the datacenter (for Square’s Seller business) as well as in the cloud (for CashApp) to provide a high degree of reliability in load distribution, service discovery and routing, with industry-leading security features. Working closely with Tetrate has helped us achieve these benefits.”— Manik Surtani, Engineering Director, Square

About Tetrate 

Started by Istio founders to reimagine application networking, Tetrate is the enterprise service mesh company managing the complexity of modern, hybrid cloud application infrastructure. Its flagship product, Tetrate Service Bridge, provides a comprehensive, enterprise-ready service mesh platform built for multi-cluster, multitenancy, and multi-cloud deployments. Customers get consistent, baked-in observability, runtime security and traffic management in any environment. Tetrate remains a top contributor to the open source projects Istio and Envoy Proxy. Find out more at www.tetrate.io.

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About Sapphire Ventures

Sapphire Ventures is a leading venture capital firm that partners with visionary teams and venture funds to build companies of consequence. For nearly two decades, Sapphire has been investing capital, resources and expertise in innovative startups and technology-focused venture funds around the world. With more than $5.7B in AUM across Sapphire Ventures, Sapphire Partners and Sapphire Sport, and with team members in Austin, London, Palo Alto and San Francisco, Sapphire is well-positioned to help scale companies and venture funds, elevating them to become global category leaders. To learn more about Sapphire Ventures, visit: https://sapphireventures.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 invested in more than 110 startups, 6 of which have gone public and more than 50 have been acquired. Notable investments include Adallom, Arista Networks, Cylance, Docusign, Graphcore, Humio, JFrog, MongoDB, Netskope, Nuvia, Nutanix, Packet, 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.delltechnologiescapital.com.