Thomvest invests in Isovalent: transforming cloud networking, security and observability
Thomvest Ventures is excited and thankful to have led the Series B round for Isovalent, the company behind the open-source Cilium and eBPF projects. Isovalent is disrupting networking, security and observability for large-scale cloud native deployments — from 100s to quite literally millions of containers in the real world. Developers and platform teams love Cilium which is now seeing rapid adoption within the open-source community — over 450 contributors, over 12,900 Github stars and an active Slack community of over 12,500 engaged users
When we first spoke with Dan Wendlandt, we were immediately impressed with the vision of the company he is building. Having been a Product Manager for a distributed-transaction-tracing product, I knew how hard it is to instrument an application and then collect data without adding performance overhead. I was fascinated with the power of eBPF to securely collect metrics data from the linux kernel without making any application changes. After a follow-up technical deep dive with Thomas Graf we were blown away and felt lucky to have met the team.
Web applications today don’t just support the business, they are the business! If the application is down or slow, the revenue impact in the SaaS subscription world is immediate. Technology architectures have evolved to enable quick software deployment, fast bug fixes and rapid iterations for best end-user experience. Modern apps are built using microservices, are hosted on a multi/hybrid cloud and heavily utilize containers and Kubernetes orchestration platforms.
This simplicity in architectures can however cause management complexity at scale when it comes to secure networking and observability. Isovalent is solving this massive painpoint in a massive market — Gartner estimates that Enterprise infrastructure software market will be $633 billion in 2026. Organizations on multi-cloud/hybrid cloud journeys want a consistent way to run their data and control planes when it comes to cloud networking. For organizations that run into challenges ranging from scale to getting security signoff, Isovalent is an easy choice!
Microservices turbocharge cloud applications, but network connectivity has been slow to catch up. At the same time, the Kubernetes platform teams today are tasked with not only enforcing but providing audit trails that rules were enforced. This one of the key problems that organizations typically experience when using CNIs or IPTables based networking products — a problem that Isovalent solves. With its open-source Hubble product, observability is baked in, something that many organizations that deal with vast amounts of sensitive data absolutely need. During our due-diligence calls, we found Isovalent’s customers to be incredibly satisfied with their interactions with the team. Another interesting point was that when customers started efforts to standardize their cloud networking tools, they found that a majority of their internal tools were already using open-source Cilium!
The cloud networking market is ripe for disruption by Isovalent’s Cilium, which is now also a CNCF Incubating project. Cilium makes it possible for developers to use eBPF without dealing with the technical implementation details. It was designed by keeping the networking, observability and security requirements of container/Kubernetes applications in mind. The benefit of eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology is that it makes kernel programmable similar to how Javascript made the browser programmable. Recall what a major revolution that was: the websites in late 1990s were static in nature and it was not possible to add interactive dynamic features like unlimited scrolling, realtime notifications etc. Web 2.0 has since completely changed our expectations about what our web browser should do — now just imagine a similar shift happening in the application space.
Umesh and I are really excited about where Dan and Thomas will take Isovalent next. Their mission, vision and passion are contagious, and we feel lucky to be a part of this journey. If you are a visionary founder and I can help you in any way, I am always reachable at ashish@thomvest.com.
