It has recently been announced that In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of the CIA, is an undisclosed investor in cloud-computing companies Docker and Mesosphere, which are both based in San Francisco, California and which are both also extremely well-funded, as their valuations are said to be equal to or more than $1 billion.
It’s unknown exactly why the CIA is interested in both of these companies; however, the agency itself has been known to invest in a great deal of enterprise-software businesses, which includes secretive data-mining startup company Palantir.
It’s also being reported that both Docker and Mesosphere also have customer deals with other governmental agencies that have not been previously mentioned before. For instance, Mesosphere is said to have a $90,000 deal with the United States Department of the Treasury, while Docker has a sole source-type of deal with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regarding providing the organization with its technology. These are both deals that are publicly viewable thanks to United States transparency laws; however, they are also deals that had gone largely unnoticed.
Mesosphere recently raised a $73.5 million investment that was led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The latest fundraising project from Docker occurred in April of 2015, when they raised approximately $95 million, in addition to another $18 million the following November. Mesosphere’s investors included Andresson Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, while Docker’s investors included Sequoia Capital and Goldman Sachs.
Mesosphere has gained popularity thanks to its Data Center Operating System, which makes it much easier to operate different types of software in both data center and cloud platforms. Their platform is based on Apache Mesos, which is technology that is used by services such as Airbnb and Twitter. Docker, in the meantime, is part of the Silicon Valley craze of software containers. These make it much easier to build and manage all kinds of software at a larger scale and across cloud platforms, which is the same technology that they will provide to the CFPB.
Both companies have not yet publicly commented regarding these reports.
Although you might not be looking to invest in cloud-computing companies, Hollister legal can help answer your questions about venture capital and/or venture capital financing.