Announcing our funding and the launch of Diagrid Conductor

Today we are excited to announce the availability of Diagrid Conductor, a fully managed Dapr on Kubernetes service along with our future plans to simplify and democratize Dapr’s APIs by making them available to all developers using any compute platform, including the browser.

The Dapr project has grown rapidly over the past year, now the 9th largest CNCF project with over 2200 contributors donating their time and experience. With the acceptance of cloud native development practices, along with distributed systems architectures as the de facto approach to develop global services, Dapr is seeing significant adoption in organizations of all sizes and types, often deployed to Kubernetes as the preferred hosting platform. Kubernetes has made multi-machine deployments and application management consistent and portable, but still presents many challenges to application and infrastructure teams when it comes to day 2 operations.

Introducing Conductor

That is why we built Diagrid Conductor, a fully managed Dapr on Kubernetes service that reduces the operational overhead of managing Dapr on Kubernetes, gives application teams valuable insights into their Daprized applications, and informs them of production best practices. Over the past six months we have worked very closely with many design partners including IBM Research, Ignition Group, Dotmatics and FYNDNA, several of whom are using Diagrid Conductor to manage Dapr in production. Diagrid Conductor has not only increased the reliability and security of their services, but enabled them to rapidly diagnose and uncover issues. Today we are enabling any organization to sign up for the Diagrid Conductor service and receive the same benefits.

We are also thrilled to announce raising $20 million in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Amplify Partners and Quiet Capital which followed a $4.2 million seed round led by Amplify Partners at the start of 2022. With this new funding we are investing more into the Dapr OSS project, as well as growing our product engineering and customer support teams. Diagrid is a company that is focused on improving developers’ ability to build distributed applications and de-risking getting them into production. It is our mission to boost developer productivity by providing tools and APIs for building cloud native applications.

Despite the rapid uptake of building distributed applications, too few developers have the tools and platforms they need to truly participate. There may be five million Kubernetes developers in the world, but serverless cloud platforms, edge native hosting environments and the rise of technologies like WASM are taking center stage in giving organizations more options than ever about where and how to run their code. Dapr was designed to democratize the development of distributed applications for all developers including frontend and backend engineers, using any programming language and choosing the best platform to run their code. That is why we have embarked on building the Diagrid Cloud Runtime APIs, a fully hosted and serverless offering of the Dapr APIs, available to applications running on any compute platform, consumable even directly from the browser. Diagrid Cloud Runtime APIs remove all the hassle of managing and configuring sidecars, you can simply access the Dapr APIs securely from a VPC/VNET on all major clouds with on demand serverless sidecars that handle only your app's traffic. You will hear more about the Cloud Runtime APIs in 2023.

Summary

Distributed applications have always been hard for developers and now with businesses demanding, secure, resilient services delivered at an increasing pace, developers are being pushed towards honing their cloud native application development skills. With this announcement today we are excited that we are able to share our funding and our vision for the future of distributed application development and look forward to engaging with the developer community and organizations of all sizes.