Lightbend: the company backing Scala, raises $20M

Lightbend formerly known as Typesafe, has raised $20 million in a series C investment round led by Intel Capital. The company is behind the Reactive Platform that includes the Akka, Play and Lagom Frameworks as well as the Scala programming language. The funding round saw participation from Blue Cloud Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Polytech Ecosystem Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The funding comes in the wake of Reactive Systems accelerating growth as more and more global 2000 enterprises move to cloud-first business models built on microservices. Enterprises including Walmart, Verizon, iHeartRadio, William Hill, and Samsung have adopted the Lightbend Reactive Platform to build low latency, fast data applications based on modern microservice architectures. The company claims that its platform and professional services have become a popular option for enterprises that leverage the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and JVM-languages like Java and Scala as well as those organizations that seek the characteristics of application resiliency and extreme scale defined by the Reactive Manifesto.

Mark Brewer, CEO, Lightbend, says, “Lightbend is very excited that Intel Capital and Blue Cloud Ventures have invested as we continue to deliver technology, services and expertise to Global 2000 companies that are refactoring their application architectures for Agile development cycles and extreme scale on-premise and in the cloud. Enterprises come to Lightbend because of our track record enabling teams to ship better code faster, and in an operations model that stands up to the most extreme scale.”

With the Lightbend Reactive Platform, developers can create message-driven applications that scale on multicore and cloud computing architectures by using technologies like Lagom, Play Framework, Akka, Apache Spark, Scala, and Java. To help our customers succeed, Lightbend partners with technology pioneers such as Databricks, IBM, and Mesosphere. Apart from the funding, the company has announced that Vibhor Rastogi, Director, Enterprise Software, Intel Capital, will be joining Lightbend’s board of directors.

Doug Fisher, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Software and Services Group, Intel Corporation, says, “Mobile and IoT use cases are driving enterprises to modernize how they process large volumes of data. Lightbend provides the fundamental building blocks for developing, deploying and managing today’s large-scale, distributed applications.”

According to Lightbend, the changes are happening because application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years. Only a few years ago a large application had tens of servers, seconds of response time, hours of offline maintenance and gigabytes of data. Today, applications are deployed on everything from mobile devices to cloud-based clusters running thousands of multi-core processors. Users expect millisecond response times and 100 per cent uptime, which needs to be met with the use of the latest technology.