Inkef Capital leads $4.5 million Series A in Wercker

Inkef Capital led a $4.5 million Series A funding round in Amsterdam-based Wercker, a container-centric automation platform. Existing investor Notion Capital also participated in the round. To date Wercker has raised $7.5 million in funding.

PRESS RELEASE

AMSTERDAM And SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — Wercker today announced a funding round of $4.5 million led by Inkef Capital with participation from existing investor Notion Capital. In addition, the company open sourced its Command Line Interface (CLI) technology to further empower the developer community to rapidly develop, build and deploy containerized applications and microservices on desktop environments.

With this latest round of funding, wercker plans to continue to drive developer adoption, expand into the enterprise market, and deepen its automation capabilities with more flexible, complex development pipelines. The investment led by Amsterdam-based Inkef Capital brings the company’s total funding to $7.5 million and marks the investment firm’s first investment in the developer tools market.

“Wercker is core to modern cloud infrastructure and development, and we’re excited to be a part of its growth,” said Robert Jan Galema, managing director at Inkef Capital. “Wercker is exactly the type of leading edge technology in which we like to invest at Inkef. It’s the only platform that automates the workflow required to build applications with independently deployable microservices, thus driving the dynamic and efficient development teams of the future.”

“We’re excited to join the Inkef Capital portfolio and continue to bridge the gap between the innovative communities in Amsterdam and Silicon Valley,” said Micha Hernández van Leuffen, founder and CEO at wercker. “We’re fortunate to have a passionate developer community behind us: a community that will only continue to grow and improve with access to our open sourced CLI technology.”

By open sourcing the wercker Command Line Interface (CLI), the company aims to empower the developer community to create workflows that attain better dev-prod parity and allow for rapid iteration. The Wercker Command Line Interface is available as an open source project on GitHub and enables developers to spin up and build Dockerized microservices on their local machines. The CLI runs on both OSX and Linux machines.

“We’re confident our continued investment in Wercker will catapult the company to meet the rising demand from the enterprise market,” said Chris Tottman, partner at Notion Capital. “Wercker has the tools and processes to help the enterprise embrace containers and microservices at scale.”

With wercker’s Docker-based infrastructure, teams can increase developer velocity with custom automation pipelines using steps that produce containers as artifacts. Once the build passes, users can continue to the deploy steps as specified in the wercker.yml. Continuously repeating these steps allows teams to work in small increments, making it easy to debug and ship faster. For more information on the wercker CLI please visit: http://wercker.com/cli.

ABOUT WERCKER

Wercker is a platform to automate development of microservices and applications. Wercker’s leadership includes Founder and CEO Micha Hernández van Leuffen and CTO Andy Smith, former co-founder of OpenStack. The company has raised more than $7.5 million in venture funding from Inkef Capital, Notion Capital and Tola Capital, among others. For more information please visit http://www.wercker.com.

ABOUT INKEF

INKEF is an Amsterdam, the Netherlands, based venture capital firm that is focused on the long-term collaboration and active support of innovative technology companies. INKEF was founded in 2010 by Dutch pension fund ABP and with € 200 million under management it is one of the largest venture capital funds in the Netherlands. INKEF focuses on investment opportunities in Healthcare, Technology and IT/NewMedia and prefers to participate from series A round financing onwards. For more information please visit: www.inkefcapital.com.

ABOUT NOTION CAPITAL
Notion is a venture capital firm foc
used on high potential businesses in the Cloud Computing and Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) markets. The Notion team has unique expertise and experience in the Cloud Computing market having founded, built and exited two highly successful businesses in the space – Star and MessageLabs. The four partners at Notion are Stephen Chandler, Ian Milbourn, Chris Tottman and Jos White. Companies within Notion’s portfolio include Adbrain, Currency Cloud, Duedil, IOCS, MOVE Guides, NewVoiceMedia and Tradeshift. For more information please visit: www.notioncapital.com.