The year-in-review: Solo.io’s big moves in 2021

The year 2021 was a game-changer for Solo.io, with our biggest leap forward since the company was first founded by Idit Levine in 2017. In fact, so much has happened that we decided to put together this quick recap in case you missed any of our news!

1. Gloo Mesh Enterprise had its 1.0 GA in February and immediately became the industry’s most secure, most reliable, and easiest way to adopt and manage Istio service meshes with tons of improvements over open source Istio. We’ve since launched Gloo Mesh Enterprise 1.1 and 1.2 with even more functionality including the new Gloo Mesh Gateway. These improvements helped Solo.io outperform the service mesh market in GigaOm’s Radar report.
2. Gloo Edge Enterprise solidified its leadership position with many advancements compared to open source Envoy Proxy in 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9, including FIPS-readiness, SOAP transforms, Flagger and GitOps, Amazon EKS Anywhere, and so much more.
3. GraphQL support on Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge was announced at Kubecon in Los Angeles. We will embed a GraphQL server natively into Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge enabling federated GraphQL queries of your APIs using your service mesh and API gateways. No additional GraphQL servers required!
4. Gloo Portal came into its own as an Istio-native developer portal with the 1.0 GA and is now a full API management suite. Gloo Portal is CRD-driven and works flawlessly with existing GitOps processes, helping customers document and share APIs.
5. We hosted SoloCon 2021 with guest speakers from T-Mobile, PegaSystems, Google, Hashicorp, and tons of other experts. You can watch the whole SoloCon playlist on YouTube. Stay tuned for SoloCon 2022, coming your way in February!
6. Team growth – we recruited the best and brightest from the industry to join us, including Lin Sun (Director of Open Source), Neeraj Poddar (Director of Engineering), Barry Lieberman (VP Sales), Erik Frieberg (CMO), and many more across the company, growing our team by 50% over the last year.
7. Customer growth and booking growth included 500%+ quarter-over-quarter growth, 50% year-over-year growth in employee count, a 100% customer renewal rate in 2021, and 200%+ net dollar growth in renewals. You can see many of our customers, in all industries from startups to global brands shown here.
8. Series C funding of $135 million from Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and True Ventures, valuing the company as a clear $1 billion unicorn. And Solo.io is a rare woman-founded and -led startup to achieve that mark.

Curious what comes next for Solo.io and the market?

Check out our 2022 predictions about service mesh, open source, GraphQL, and eBPF on the VMblog site!