Lightbend (formerly Typesafe), the company behind the Reactive Platform that includes the Akka, Play and Lagom Frameworks as well as the Scala programming language, today announced it has closed a $20 million Series C funding round led by Intel Capital. Blue Cloud Ventures also joined Intel Capital as a new investor, with full participation from previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, Polytech Ecosystem Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Vibhor Rastogi, Director for Enterprise Software at Intel Capital, will join Lightbend’s board of directors.
Enterprises including Walmart, Verizon, iHeartRadio, William Hill, and Samsung (see case studies) have adopted the Lightbend Reactive Platform to build low latency, fast data applications based on modern microservice architectures. Lightbend’s platform and professional services have become a popular option for enterprises that leverage the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and JVM-languages like Java and Scala — and that seek the characteristics of application resiliency and extreme scale defined by the Reactive Manifesto.
“Lightbend is very excited that Intel Capital and Blue Cloud Ventures have invested as we continue to deliver technology, services and expertise to Global 2000 companies that are refactoring their application architectures for Agile development cycles and extreme scale on-prem and in the cloud,” said Mark Brewer, CEO of Lightbend. “Enterprises come to Lightbend because of our track record enabling teams to ship better code faster, and in an operations model that stands up to the most extreme scale.”
“Mobile and IoT use cases are driving enterprises to modernize how they process large volumes of data,” said Doug Fisher, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Software and Services Group at Intel Corporation. “Lightbend provides the fundamental building blocks for developing, deploying and managing today’s large-scale, distributed applications.”
“These changes are happening because application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years,” said Jonas Bonér, founder and CTO at Lightbend, and creator of Akka. “Only a few years ago a large application had tens of servers, seconds of response time, hours of offline maintenance and gigabytes of data. Today, applications are deployed on everything from mobile devices to cloud-based clusters running thousands of multi-core processors. Users expect millisecond response times and 100% uptime. Today’s demands are simply not met by yesterday’s software architectures.”
