Mesosphere raises $73.5 million with Microsoft participating, launches Velocity tool

Mesosphere, a startup that sells a “data center operating system” drawing on open-source tools such as Apache Mesos, today announced a $73.5 million funding round. Hewlett Packard Enterprise led the round, with participation from Microsoft, according to a blog post.

In addition to the new funding, Mesosphere is announcing the 1.0 release of the Marathon open-source software for managing containers on top of Mesos. Mesosphere is also announcing the launch of software called Velocity for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). This type of technology helps developers deploy new software builds on servers. The idea is to help companies quickly and easily make software tweaks to improve services and fix bugs. Velocity is based on Marathon and integrates with the open-source Jenkins CI tool.

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“A large number of major companies, including eBay, already run massive CI/CD environments built on Mesos, Jenkins, Docker and other tools in order to speed up the process of pushing code live and making developers more agile,” Mesosphere said in the statement. “Velocity brings these same capabilities to every type of company.”

These new tools could help Mesosphere further distinguish itself from other companies — namely Docker and Mesosphere — that deploy applications in containers, which are lightweight alternatives to more traditional virtual machines.

Then again, the move could put Mesosphere in more direct competition with other container-oriented CI tool providers.

A Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Triangle Peak Partners joined in the new funding round, alongside Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft.

Marathon is part of Microsoft’s recently launched Azure Container Service for deploying container-based applications on the Azure infrastructure, according to the statement.

Mesosphere started in 2013 and is based in San Francisco. The startup has more than three dozen customers, a spokesperson told VentureBeat.