Congratulations team Rancher !
SUSE, one of the largest independent open source company, has entered into definitive agreement to acquire our partner company Rancher, the open source leader in enterprise Kubernetes that has become the de facto standard for compute platform across cloud, data-centers and edge devices.
Rancher’s journey was our second celebratory journey with Sheng Liang and Shannon Williams, successful entrepreneurs who had previously built and sold the cloud infrastructure leader, cloud.com. When they told us in 2014 that they are starting another company, our response was “we cannot but partner with you regardless of what you are building, where do we sign ?”. Yes, Sheng and Shannon make a compelling founding team that everyone loves: super smart, agile, all-in founders with complementary skillsets, who have successfully worked together in the past. And this time around, the founding team got strengthened further by addition of two exceptional engineering leaders Will Chan and Darren Shepherd as cofounders. We are thankful to Sheng, Shannon, Will and Darren for giving us the opportunity to co-lead Rancher’s series A. The rest as they say is now history.
Equally compelling was their vision of enabling “compute anywhere” across any infrastructure (public clouds, private data centers or edge devices). To enable that vision at a time when Kubernetes was still a fledgling project, Rancher initially set out to build their own system for managing software containers. However, as Kubernetes started gaining popularity, Rancher’s agile team quickly adopted Kubernetes as the underlying orchestrator. Within a short span of time Rancher surpassed every other alternative solution to become the most widely adopted enterprise Kubernetes platform with hundreds of millions of downloads, a thriving open source community across the world and a growing roster of marquee enterprise customers.
From Day 1, Rancher has built a product-first culture with die-hard obsession for solving real customer problems, while remaining frugal. The focus has always been on relentless iteration of product features that matter and building product that users love. This coupled with organic open source adoption enabled Rancher to grow fast while maintaining highly efficient operations.
A bit about SUSE (“Software- und System-Entwicklung”): SUSE was formed in 1992 as “Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung mbH”, one year prior to the start of another company that would eventually become Red Hat. SUSE is the largest independent supplier of Linux and associated products. SUSE’s recently appointed CEO, Melissa Di Donato (formerly COO SAP Digital Core ) is on a path to take SUSE to the leadership position in open source operating systems and containers and its well-deserved glory. With the addition of Rancher, our bets are on SUSE. Competitors watch out!
While Rancher is being acquired by SUSE, our hearts are still with the company and its exceptional team. SUSE+Rancher team, we are waiting for call for advice, brainstorming or just talking about the industry. You may have been acquired, but you will forever remain part of the Nexus family.
We are proud and honored to have partnered with Sheng, Shannon and team Rancher from Day 1. We wish them the very best in all their future endeavors.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Nexus Venture Partners
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