Solomon Hykes’ Dagger raises $20M and launches public beta

After a lengthy gestation period, Solomon Hykes is publicly launching Dagger, his second act since leaving Docker, the container software company he founded in 2008 and left in 2018.

Founded nearly three years ago by Docker founder Hykes, former Docker VP of engineering Sam Alba, and former Docker lead architect Andrea Luzzardi, Dagger aims to help developers automate various deployment tasks by empowering engineers to build their own CI/CD pipelines from a catalog of pre-defined building blocks, which they can then run anywhere.

The launch of the public beta comes at the same time as a $20 million Series A funding round, led by Redpoint Ventures, with involvement from a who’s who of industry heavyweights including Y Combinator, the former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, former Google Cloud CTO Brian Stevens, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, the founder of Solo.io Idit Levine, Bitnami cofounder Daniel Lopez, and Prometheus creator Julius Volz.

Dagger says it will use the funding to grow the team and continue building developer interest in the open source community. It had previously raised $10 million in combined pre-seed and seed funding.

“With virtually all computing moving to the cloud, software supply chains are growing so large and complex that they have become a significant bottleneck,” Hykes said, as part of the funding announcement.

This growing complexity forces devops engineers, who “have an abundance of specialized tools at their disposal,” to “waste time gluing them together into artisanal pipelines,” Hykes said. “Solving this problem is the holy grail of devops, and we believe we have solved it.”