Solo.io Advances Application Networking Market with $135 Million Series C Funding

Leader in Istio Service Mesh Achieves “Unicorn Status” Amidst Tremendous Company, Market Growth

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Oct. 7, 2021 — Solo.io, the application networking company, today announced it has raised $135 million in Series C funding at a valuation of $1 billion — a 10x increase in valuation since the company’s previous funding round in October 2020. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and True Ventures. Today’s financing brings Solo.io’s total funding raised to $171.5 million. This latest funding follows tremendous industry recognition as well as company and customer growth during the first half of 2021 including 500+% quarter-over-quarter growth, a 100% customer renewal rate, and 200+% net dollar growth in renewals. Solo.io will use the money to expand its worldwide go-to-market efforts, invest in product development and professional services, and expand its services and support offerings.

“In today’s digital world, connectivity is the lifeblood of an organization’s ability to deliver value,” said Ram Woo, partner at Altimeter Capital. “We believe Solo.io’s innovative application networking products are disrupting the existing API management landscape and tapping a broader market for service connectivity. Solo.io brings together amazing execution, customer focus, and a highly differentiated technology platform. We have been watching them for a while and are excited to partner with Idit and the team.”

Solo.io has announced several industry “first and only” product offerings this year that enable enterprises to connect application services across clusters and clouds. The Gloo Mesh Enterprise platform is an enterprise service mesh built on Istio for multi-cluster Kubernetes, VMs, and hybrid cloud deployments. Gloo Mesh Enterprise simplifies adoption of a service mesh, solves for difficult observability, security, and high-availability scenarios, and increases developer productivity. Gloo Mesh was also recently named an Outperformer and Leader in the GigaOm Radar Report for Service Mesh.

The vision of Solo.io is built upon the open source Envoy proxy and Istio service mesh, the clear winning projects in the service mesh space. Solo.io has been an active contributor to both projects from the very beginning. The Solo.io leadership team includes members of the Istio Steering Committee and Istio Technical Oversight Committee as well as noted Istio experts, including Lin Sun, Christian Posta, Ram Vennam, and Neeraj Poddar.

Solo.io will continue its growth trajectory using the new financing to further scale out its worldwide go-to-market strategy — recruiting sales, marketing, customer success, and engineering roles. As the market continues to evolve, Solo.io will be at the forefront of innovation and R&D in the application networking space.

“Our strategic focus has always been anticipating and meeting customer needs from a market and product standpoint. The fact that world-renowned companies such as SAP, Vonage, ADP, and Schneider Electric have partnered with us to provide application networking for their most critical business applications underscores this commitment,” said Idit Levine, Solo.io’s founder and CEO. “Solo has the concentration of deep expertise, customer commitment, and ability to execute that is unmatched by any other company in this area. This latest funding emphasizes that we are a safe, proven choice for enterprises looking to modernize their application network. Our company is now at an inflection point in terms of growth — and this investment will fuel our next level of team, product, and company expansion.”

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Media Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Offleash PR for Solo.io
solo@offleashpr.com