Weaveworks, the makers of the Weave network for Docker, today announced it has secured $5 million in Series A financing led by Accel Partners. The company will use its initial round of funding to expand the product development team and build out a new US organization to complement its existing UK operation (formerly known as Zettio Ltd.).

Founded by the team that created RabbitMQ, Weave enables customers to build and migrate applications to run on any container technology. Weave’s product delivers a software-defined network across containers and layers critical cross-container services on top. For example, Weave simplifies how containers may be networked into secure application clusters which can then be migrated through development, testing and production.

“Early adopters are already reporting ‘10x’ wins and cost savings from containerization”, said Alexis Richardson, CEO Weaveworks. “Weave aims to bring those gains to everyone, by focusing on ease of use. Our approach is to follow proven Unix and Internet modular design principles and APIs, so that customers never have to learn a new skill, never have to use unproven operational tooling, and never have to fundamentally rewrite applications.”

Since the launch of Weave on the 9th September 2014, Weave has quickly become one of the most popular Docker-related open source projects on GitHub. Weave features prominently within the top ten most starred Docker-related repositories (including those sponsored by Docker Inc. themselves), out of a total population of over 19,000 – placing it within the top 0.05%.

Kevin Comolli, Partner at Accel Partners, who will join the board, said “We were especially impressed with the strength in depth of the Weave team, and focus with which they delivered product to engage the market. Containerization is changing the rules of application development very fast, and in Weaveworks we see a team that can really deliver innovation at the speed required to win in this market.”

Weave has been rapidly integrated into the containers ecosystem and deployed in conjunction with CoreOS, Kubernetes, Clocker and more. It has been used to connect together containers spanning multiple data centers and providers (AWS, Azure, and local) running everything from traditional multi-tier, multi-host applications to clusters of distributed datastores such as Riak, Cassandra, Scalaris and a multi-tenant Spark-based system with subnet isolation, all without requiring developers to become networking experts.

“A powerful solution for inter-container networking is one of the big unsolved problems in the Docker ecosystem,” said Gabriel Monroy, CTO of Deis. “Weave provides a great way to wire up containers across hosts today. I’m excited to see how Weave evolves to tackle other features that solve important customer problems both for our own platform, Deis, and for the larger ecosystem.”

View a demo of Weave deploying Apache Spark with Elasticsearch to provide real time search and analytics for Twitter feeds, here: http://weave.works/demo