Dell, Intel Capital Invest Millions In Open Source Startup Tetrate

“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,” said Jai Das, president of Sapphire Ventures, which led the $40 million funding round.

Dell Technologies Capital and Intel Capital participated in a $40 million Series B investment round for open-source service mesh technology startup Tetrate, which plans to create a new Software as-a-Service offering with the funding.

Tetrate is led by several engineering stars including CEO and co-founder Varun Talwar, who co-created Istio at Google, as well as Tetrate co-founder Jeyappragash Jeyakeerthi, who previously led Twitter’s Cloud Infrastructure Management Platform. The new company is commercializing open-source networking technology to allow for easier data sharing across different applications and already boasts a number of customers including large financial services companies and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Tetrate is one of the largest contributors to the Istio and Envoy proxy open source projects. The Milpitas, Calif.-based startup has raised approximately $52 million since forming in 2018 with lead investors including Dell, Intel, Samsung, 8VC, Scale Venture Partners and Sapphire Ventures.

[Related: Top 10 Highest IT Salaries Based On Tech Skills In 2021: Dice]

Tetrate provides a service mesh built on the open-source Istio and Envoy proxy technologies with its flagship product the Tetrate Service Bridge, a management platform for enterprises that need a unified and consistent way to secure and manage services and traditional workloads across complex, heterogeneous deployment environments, according to the company. Tetrate Service Bridge enables seamless connectivity, security, and observability for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

The new $40 million in funding will be used to develop advanced capabilities within Tetrate Service Bridge, which the company dubs as the only cloud-agnostic, hybrid-cloud applications networking platform.

Tetrate said it will also leverage the funding to create a new SaaS offering, “an Istio-based platform that makes the application service mesh easier to consume.” Tetrate said it also plans to expand its go-to-market activities in the Americas and initiate go-to-market teams in Europe and Asia with the new funding.

Additionally, it was announced this week that Jai Das, president and managing director of Sapphire Ventures, will join Tetrate’s Board of Directors.

“As the microservices revolution picks up steam, it’s indispensable to use Istio for managing applications built with microservices and deployed on containers,” said Das. “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.”

Tetrate customers get consistent baked-in observability, runtime security and traffic management in any environment. The company said it will remain a top contributor to the open source projects Istio and Envoy Proxy.