We are more than seven years into the idea of contemporary containerization, and it still needs a complex set of tools and a high level of understanding on how containers work. The DockerSlim open source task established numerous years ago from a desire to get rid of some of that intricacy for developers.
Slim.ai, a new start-up that wants to develop an industrial product on top of the open source task, revealed a $6.6 million seed round today from Boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP Ventures and TechAviv Founder Partners.
Company co-founder and CEO John Amaral states he and fellow co-founder and CTO Kyle Quest have actually collaborated for several years, but it was Mission who nurtured and began DockerSlim. “We began coming together around a task that Kyle developed called DockerSlim. He’s the main author, inventor and up until we started doing this company, the sole proprietor of that of that community,” Amaral described.
At the time Mission built DockerSlim in 2015, he was dealing with Docker containers and he wanted a method to automate a few of the lower level tasks involved in dealing with them. “I wished to fix my own discomfort points and issues that I needed to deal with, and my group had to deal with handling containers. Containers were an interesting new technology, but there was a lot of domain knowledge you needed to build production-grade applications and not everyone had that type of domain competence on the team, which is quite common in practically every team,” he said.
He initially constructed the tool to enhance container images, however he began taking a look at other elements of the DevOps lifecycle including the author, develop, deploy and run phases. He found as he looked at that, he saw the possibility of constructing a business company on top of the open source job.
Quinn says that while the open source project is a beginning point, he and Amaral see a lot of locations to expand. “You require to integrate it into your designer workflow and after that you have various systems you deal with, various container registries, various cloud environments and all of that. […] You need an option that can deal with those needs and doing that through an open source tool is tough, which’s where there’s a lot of chance to provide premium value and have an industrial item offering,” Quinn explained.
Ed Sim, founder and general partner at Boldstart Ventures, among the seed financiers sees a company bringing development to a location of innovation where it has been lacking, while putting some more control in the hands of designers. “Slim can shift that all left and give designers the power through the Slim tools to answer all those questions, and then, boom, they can establish containers, push them into production and then DevOps can do their thing,” he stated.
They are just 15 individuals today including the creators, but Amaral says building a diverse and inclusive business is important to him, which’s why among his early hires was head of culture. “One of the very first two or three people we brought into the company was our head of culture. We really have that role in our business now, and she is a rock star and an extremely proficient and focused individual on developing a terrific culture. Culture and diversity to me are two sides of the very same coin,” he stated.
The business is still in the really early stages of developing that product. In the meantime, they continue to nurture the open source project and to build a community around that. They intend to utilize that as a springboard to construct interest in the industrial item, which ought to be readily available a long time later this year.
Article curated by RJ Shara from Source. RJ Shara is a Bay Area Radio Host (Radio Jockey) who talks about the startup ecosystem – entrepreneurs, investments, policies and more on her show The Silicon Dreams. The show streams on Radio Zindagi 1170AM on Mondays from 3.30 PM to 4 PM.
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