This is fantastic news for our users and partners. We will continue to deliver the Bitnami catalog of apps that you know and love, across all the platforms we currently support, including all the major cloud vendors. Joining forces with VMware means that we will be able to both double-down on the breadth and depth of our current offering and bring Bitnami to even more clouds as well as accelerating our push into the enterprise.
We built Bitnami from zero to a significant user base, with all of the major cloud vendors as customers. We primarily bootstrapped the business, having raised just $1.1M from YCombinator and a handful of great angels, when we were already profitable. We have a great team, great products, and a great business. Why join forces with VMware? This was actually an easy decision and has to do with our shared vision for the future.
Our mission at Bitnami is to make awesome software available to everyone, everywhere. There is a lot of great software out there, much of it open source, that is out of reach of many developers and system administrators because it is too complex to set up and maintain.
Our focus is to make that software accessible to the largest number of users and developers possible. We started with native installers that ran on Windows, Linux, and macOS. After a few clicks, users could get a complete web application such as WordPress up and running in their laptop without having to manually install and configure Apache, MySQL, PHP, and supporting libraries. Over time, we expanded to VMs, cloud images, and containers while maintaining our focus on keeping applications easy to use, secure, and up to date.
Over the past years, we expanded our focus to help enterprises use Bitnami in production, often as part of a migration of their application to the cloud or their adoption of Kubernetes. We realized that, if we wanted to continue to grow, we would have to raise money, as building an enterprise salesforce is not easy to do when you are bootstrapped. This was a decision we didn’t take lightly, but not raising money had its own risks, including potentially missing a window of opportunity in the industry.
As part of the fundraising process, we were approached by several vendors in the space to make strategic investments or, in some cases, join forces. While this was not our original goal, as part of the conversations that we had during this process, we realized that VMware would be the ideal partner for us. We both believe in a Kubernetes and multi-cloud future. We both share large enterprise customers, including cloud service providers. We both are building products and services to help companies navigate this multi-platform, multi-vendor world with a focus on enterprises. VMware already has more than 500,000 customers globally!
What really sealed the deal for us was getting to know the team at VMware: smart, talented and driven. This positive personal chemistry was tremendously important to us as founders. When you have been building a company over a decade, you want to make sure it is the right home for the team and product.
So what does it mean for you, our users and partners? In a way, nothing is changing. We will continue to develop and maintain our application catalog across all the platforms we support and even expand to additional ones. Additionally, if you are a company using Bitnami in production, a lot of new opportunities just opened up. Get in touch!
Startups are a team sport. Bitnami has become what it is today thanks to the hard work of an incredible team that we have assembled over the years and that has stuck with us through all the ups and downs of the startup rollercoaster. For some of them, this was their first job out of college, and they have grown professionally over the years to become great managers and engineers, alongside the company itself. We cannot think of a better way to continue their contributions and career growth than as part of VMware, an industry leader.
We also want to take this opportunity to thank those who believed in us from the beginning. We were fortunate to have an incredible group of investors and advisors who have supported us along the way, and would like to especially thank the following people for their unwavering support: Jesus Blanco, Armando Pauker, Peter Courture, Joe Brescia, Clemens Buss, Beau Vrolyk, Elad Gil, Othman Laraki, Diego Basch, Jun Li, Eric Hahn, Ullas Naik, Hiro Maeda, Mike Olson, Michael Hughes, Marten Mickos, Michael Levit, Ali Rowghani, and the entire Y Combinator team.
Erica, Daniel, and the Bitnami team
