Mirantis acquires Shipa

Container management platform Mirantis, which you may remember from its OpenStack days and from acquiring Docker Enterprise in 2019, today announced that it has acquired Shipa, a startup that builds tools to help developers develop, deploy and manage cloud-native applications. Shipa previously raised a $3.75 million seed round in 2020, co-led by Engineering Capital and Jump Capital. Mirantis tells me that the price of today’s acquisition was between $10 million and $30 million (in both cash and stock).

Mirantis plans to integrate Shipa into its Lens platform, which promises to help businesses accelerate their cloud-native application delivery. Like Shipa, Lens aims to abstract the complexities of building and running cloud-native applications on top of Kubernetes away by providing a single platform that developers and ops teams can use to develop, deploy, monitor and debug their workloads. Mirantis, it seems, was especially interested in Shipa’s capabilities around security and governance, as well as its tooling to make updates easier. The two companies are also working on integrating the two platforms, with a first integration of Lens into the Lens Desktop planned for March. The company will also integrate Shipa into its Mirantis Kubernetes Engine.

“Our goal at Shipa, from the beginning, was to give DevOps and platform engineering teams the capability to choose their own underlying tools with a focus on automation to reduce the complexity of the technology infrastructure required by cloud-native applications,” said Bruno Andrade, co-founder and CEO of Shipa. “Our technology makes deployment and management of applications and updates much easier and faster by letting developers focus on what they do best and not infrastructure.”

Andrade, together with his co-founder and VP of engineering Vivek Pandey, as well as the rest of the Shipa team, will join Mirantis.

Mirantis CEO and co-founder Adrian Ionel noted that “Shipa’s technology puts groundbreaking application discovery, optimization, security and management capabilities in the hands of Lens users.”

It’s worth noting that Lens, which is available as an open source product (at least for the core of its capabilities), currently has an installed base of one million users, with 50% of Fortune 100 companies using it, according to Mirantis.

While Mirantis isn’t exactly on an acquisition spree, it’s worth noting that the company also acquired amazee.io in July 2022, another service that helps developers deploy their cloud-native applications.

“We were the first investors in Shipa’s vision of application infrastructure-as-code, and now, as shareholders in Mirantis, we can’t wait to continue our journey together,” said Shipa investor Ashmeet Sidana, founder and chief engineer of Engineering Capital. “Mirantis has a terrific track record with acquisitions and we believe Shipa is complementary to Mirantis’ vision of simplifying the Kubernetes developer experience — adding the observability and management of applications. We are looking forward to watching the combined vision come to fruition.”