[UPDATED April 19th 2017]
Another one of the poster child’s of the thriving Amsterdam-startup scene has been acquired. Wercker, a continuous delivery platform for software development, was scooped up by Oracle. It marks the third acquisition in the inaugural class 2012 of Rockstart’s accelerator.
Democratize developer tooling
In a joint statement, the companies say they want “to democratize developer tooling for the modern cloud. Oracle and Wercker share the view that developers greatly benefit from focusing on building great products and applications. Oracle is building a leading IaaS and PaaS platform as the foundation for a new generation of cloud computing. A leading cloud needs great tooling and adding Wercker’s container lifecycle management to Oracle’s Cloud provides engineering teams with the developer experience they deserve to build, launch and scale their applications.”
Automation platform
The Amsterdam-born, San Francisco-bred startup describes its offering as follows: Wercker is a Docker-Native CI/CD Automation platform for Kubernetes & Microservice Deployments. For those of you who don’t speak brogrammer’s jargon, here’s how Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, CEO and founder, explains it on his LinkedIn: “Modern applications consist of multiple moving parts, but the developer tools we use today were designed for a world of monolithic applications. Wercker is an automation platform that enables developers to rapidly develop, build and deploy their microservices.”
(If you still have no clue what it’s all about, read this interview in Dutch with Hernandez van Leuffen. )
Strong founder
“Micha Hernandez van Leuffen is one of the strongest Amsterdam-based startup founders we’ve worked with at Rockstart,” Rune Theill, co-founder and CEO of Rockstart states. “He is a rare breed of European entrepreneurs. He connects tech, product, and business expertise at a very high level. Since the inception of Wercker, Mies understood to bridge the opportunity of operating the company with a team in Amsterdam, while simultaneously creating strong ties to San Francisco where he gained expertise, network, and—most importantly—market traction in the developer scene.”
Heavily funded to Dutch standards
According to Crunchbase, the Rockstart-accelerated startup was heavily funded for Dutch standards with $7.9M in 3 Rounds from 10 Investors. Its last round was led by Inkef Capital, the heavily pension fund-funded investor that recently poured millions in Blendle. Further terms were not disclosed, however, according to the statement, “the [acquisition] is subject to customary closing conditions”.
Fifth Rockstart acquisition
Wercker is the fifth Rockstart portfolio company to be acquired and the third company to be bought from its first 2012 Rockstart Accelerator batch that consisted of ten startups. Before the news about Wercker, Postcron was the first ever Rockstart startup to be acquired in 2015 by SocialTools, and Imgzine the second in December 2016 by Ortec. Peerby, Owlin and Pastbook are three startups from that batch, that also achieved tremendous success.