We're excited to announce that CoreOS was acquired by Red Hat for a purchase price of $250 million to extend Red Hat's Kubernetes and container management leadership. We invested in the company's seed round and every subsequent round of funding, and are excited for the team to have the world's leading provider of open source solutions behind them.
We first got excited about the company when I read an article in Wired Magazine in August 2013 titled "Linux Hackers Rebuild the Internet from a Silicon Valley Garage." In the article, it profiled Alex Polvi who I met in 2010 when he was building Cloudkick and I was at Ignition. Shortly after, his company was acquired by Rackspace in December of 2010. After running Rackspace's infrastructure teams for several years, Alex spun out and reconnected with his old colleagues from University of Oregon to launch CoreOS.
Alex and his co-founder Brandon built CoreOS to become the underlying operating system for modern web applications. Basing their technology on similar operating systems developed by Google, Amazon and large Wall Street banks, the team believed that developers needed a better way to maintain and run their infrastructure in a containerized world and give developers the ability to update the operating system with patches for downtime, security and resilience without disrupting the applications that run on top of it.
The team coined the phrase #GIFEE - Google Infrastructure for Everyone Else. Taking technology developed at large scale consumer companies and spinning it out to make available for other enterprises to benefit from. This has become part of our core investment thesis as well.
The day after reading the article, I jumped on a flight to the Bay Area and met with Alex to learn about their vision for the company and the progress they were making. Shortly after, we committed to an $850k seed round alongside Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and SVAngel.
After developing their initial operating system, the company quickly moved up the stack to develop a full suite of tools that included rkt, ETCD, Quay and Tectonic, and attached their products more closely to the complexity around managing Kubernetes. It was a recipe for success; CoreOS is at the forefront of the enterprise's shift to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Congrats to Red Hat on acquiring an incredible company and thank you to Alex and Brandon for allowing us to be part of the journey. We're excited to see what you do at Red Hat and beyond.