Container management platform Mirantis, which you may remember from the OpenStack days and acquisition of Docker Enterprise in 2019, today announced it has acquired Shipa, a startup that builds tools to help developers develop, deploy and manage cloud-native applications . Shipa raised a $3.75 million seed round earlier in 2020 co-led by Engineering Capital and Jump Capital. Mirantis tells me the price of today’s acquisition was between $10 million and $30 million (both cash and stock).
Mirantis plans to integrate Shipa into her lens platform, which promises to help companies accelerate their cloud-native application delivery. Like Shipa, Lens aims to remove the complexity of building and running cloud-native applications on Kubernetes by providing a single platform that developers and operations teams can use to develop, deploy, monitor, and debug their workloads. It seems that Mirantis was mainly interested in Shipa’s capabilities security and governance, as well as the tooling to make updates easier. The two companies are also working on integrating the two platforms, with an initial integration of Lens into the Lens desktop scheduled for March. The company will also integrate Shipa into its Mirantis Kubernetes Engine.
“Our goal at Shipa from the start has been to empower DevOps and platform engineering teams to choose their own underlying tools with a focus on automation to reduce the technology infrastructure complexity required for cloud-native applications,” said Bruno Andrade, co-founder and CEO of Shipa. “Our technology makes deploying and managing applications and updates much easier and faster by allowing developers to focus on what they do best, not infrastructure.”
Andrade, along with his co-founder and VP of engineering Vivek Pandey, as well as the rest of the Shipa team, will join Mirantis.
Mirantis CEO and co-founder Adrian Ionel commented that “Shipa’s technology puts groundbreaking capabilities for application discovery, optimization, security and management in the hands of Lens users.”
It’s worth noting that Lens, which is available as an open-source product (at least for the core of its capabilities), currently has an installed base of one million users, with 50% of Fortune 100 companies using it, according to Mirantis.
While Mirantis isn’t exactly looking for acquisitions, it’s worth noting that the company is doing just that acquired amazee.io in July 2022, another service that helps developers deploy their cloud-native applications.
“We were the first investors in Shipa’s application infrastructure-as-code vision, and now, as shareholders of Mirantis, we can’t wait to continue our journey together,” said Shipa investor Ashmeet Sidana, founder and chief engineer of Engineering Capital. “Mirantis has a great track record of acquisitions and we believe Shipa is complementary to Mirantis’ vision of simplifying the Kubernetes developer experience by adding application observability and management. We look forward to seeing the combined vision become a reality.”