AWS Lambda competitor Iron.io raises $8M

Iron.io, a startup with “task processing” software that can automatically do computational work in parallel or according to a specific schedule, is announcing today an $8 million round of funding.

The startup was founded back in 2010, but things have become more interesting in the past year with public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services announcing Lambda, a service that bears a resemblance to Iron.io’s core IronWorker software.

“If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then consider us flattered by Amazon,” Iron.io cofounder and chief technology officer Travis Reeder wrote in a blog post published in January. “The new AWS Lambda service is nearly the same thing as Iron.io’s IronWorker service, solving the same problem with a slightly different API.”

Iron.io has picked up usage at tech companies like Google, New Relic, Rackspace, Tinder, and Twitter, and companies in other industries have adopted it, too. Now the startup is better equipped to promote its tools in the aftermath of Amazon’s entrance into the market for event-driven computing systems.

Part of the allure of a tool like IronWorker is that it allows engineers to program machines to execute code in reaction to certain circumstances. It can assist in the process of cleaning up data as it comes in, delivering notifications at scale, sending out emails, or handling mobile check-ins quickly, for example. But really, it can be used for a wide range of purposes.

The startup distinguishes itself from Amazon (and open-source Celery and Resque) in a few ways. Its IronWorker service and its IronMQ message queue service can be run on public clouds or in on-premises data centers. And while Lambda is limited to Node.js and Java, IronWorker can work with those as well as Clojure, Go, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, and binary code.

Baseline Ventures led the new round in Iron.io. Bain Capital Ventures, Cloud Capital Partners, Divergent Ventures, and Ignition Partners also participated. To date, the San Francisco startup has raised $13.5 million.