DOCOMO invests in RAFAY for Kubernetes federation

NTT DOCOMO Ventures has made an equity investment in RAFAY SYSTEMS, a start-up developing a unique lifecycle management system for containerized applications.

RAFAY builds on top of Kubernetes to deliver multi-cluster federation, runtime configuration updates, and cluster and application blueprinting.

The investment was part of an $8 million Series A round that was led by Ridge Ventures and also included Costanoa Ventures and Moment Ventures. The company previously raised $4.1m in seed funding. RAFAY says its solution enables service providers to securely and scalably distribute and operate applications in any environment while reducing reliance on resource-intensive, in-house developed tools.

RAFAY is based in Sunnyvale, CA and led by CEO and Cofounder, Haseeb Budhani.

“Kubernetes is a crucial innovation that has fast-tracked the industry’s adoption of containerized applications running in any cloud, hybrid or edge environment,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO and Cofounder, Rafay Systems. “But Kubernetes presents a steep learning curve to companies embarking on app modernization journeys. At Rafay, we are on a mission to make Kubernetes easy to consume by any company, regardless of how far along they are on their journey. The Rafay platform empowers DevOps teams to focus on their business critical software development instead of building and maintaining complex internal tools.”