Lightbend, the US-based creator of a development platform for distributed applications, has closed a $15m funding round featuring computing firm IBM, semiconductor producer Intel and networking equipment provider Juniper Networks.
Bain Capital Ventures, the venture capital arm of private equity firm Bain Capital, also toom part in the round, as did Blue Cloud Ventures and Shasta Ventures, while Intel and Juniper invested through subsidiaries Intel Capital and Juniper Ventures respectively.
Lightbend’s Reactive Platform facilitates the development of scalable, distributed apps for modern microservice architectures. IBM’s investment comes shortly after it agreed a strategic collaboration agreement with Lightbend to develop artificial intelligence and cognitive enterprise software.
Mark Brewer, Lightbend’s president and CEO, said: “This investment from IBM and the development work we are embarking upon is a natural progression of our work to support advanced cognitive application development. As the leader in cognitive and AI, IBM brings important code and tools to our customers and the Java and Scala communities.
“IBM’s support of Lightbend and the Reactive Platform is a validation of our shared vision for helping developers build distributed applications for the new world of cloud computing architectures.”
Lightbend has now raised $52m since it was founded in 2011, $14m of which came in a 2012 round backed by Juniper Networks’ Junos Innovation Fund, Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures and angel investor François Stieger, back when the company was known as Typesafe.
Intel Capital led Lightbend’s $20m series C round in May 2016, investing together with Bain Capital Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Polytech Ecosystem Ventures.