Cisco leads $5M round for multicloud application integration startup TriggerMesh

Cisco Systems Inc. has led a $5 million funding round for TriggerMesh Inc., a startup with a Kubernetes-based software platform that makes it easier to link together applications running in different public clouds and on-premises data centers.

TriggerMesh announced the round this morning. The Raleigh, North Carolina- and Switzerland-based startup said existing investors Index Ventures and Crane Venture Partners participated as well, along with a number of others.

Enterprises often need to connect their applications with one another to support business activities. For example, the finance team may wish to send customer purchase logs from their company’s sales database to a revenue forecasting application. The marketing department, meanwhile, may wish to transfer the same customer purchase logs to an analytics tool it uses to identify what products the company’s users buy more often.

What makes the task challenging is that applications are often scattered across different places. For example, the sales database containing the customer purchase logs may be deployed on an on-premises data center, while the marketing department’s analytics tool might be running on Amazon Web Services. Linking together applications hosted on different infrastructure often requires significant amounts of time and custom code.

TriggerMesh’s platform promises to simplify the task. It provides a library of ready-made integrations for connecting popular enterprise applications and cloud services with one another. The startup refers to these ready-made components as “bridges.” If a company requires an integration that isn’t available in the library, its software engineers can develop it using TriggerMesh’s built-in development tools.

TriggerMesh says its platform streamlines development because it provides the ability to write integrations using an approach known as declarative programming. 

Historically, developers would use an approach known as imperative programming to perform the task. It involves manually specifying each and every action a piece of software must perform to achieve a certain goal, in this case integrating two applications. With declarative programming, developers don’t have to specify every single action but rather provide a relatively abstract description of the goal they wish to accomplish. This abstract description takes considerably less effort to create. 

The  result, TriggerMesh says, is that companies can integrate their applications faster and more cost-effectively. Moreover, the startup says that because its platform is easier to use than more traditional application integration platforms, enterprises don’t have to hire consultants to help them with projects. 

Integrating applications running on different cloud platforms isn’t the only way that TriggerMesh’s platform can be used. According to the startup, the platform lends itself to application performance and health monitoring as well. If a company has workloads spread across multiple public clouds, it can use TriggerMesh to link them to a monitoring platform that provides features for detecting technical problems.

TriggerMesh’s platform runs on Kubernetes. It uses an open-source tool called Knative to automate certain management tasks, which the startup says makes deploying and running the software relatively simple. 

The Cisco-led investment TriggerMesh announced today follows a $3 million seed round in early 2020. The startup used the proceeds from that round to finalize development of its platform. With its latest $5 million investment, TriggerMesh will expand its sales and marketing operation to win more customers, as well as continue investing in product delivery initiatives. 

“Cisco has a footprint in every enterprise and cloud,“ said TriggerMesh co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Hinkle. “Through our collaborative efforts we feel that we can provide a leading enterprise automation solution that will enable users to accelerate their digital business regardless of where their infrastructure is deployed, be it on-prem or in the cloud.”

The market for products such as TriggerMesh’s platform that can make it easier to build and maintain hybrid clouds is growing as more companies adopt the hybrid cloud approach. As a result, TriggerMesh backer Cisco is increasingly prioritizing this market not only with its startup investment strategy but also in its product roadmap.  

Last year, the technology giant acquired ThousandEyes Inc., whose software can be used to monitor the networks of hybrid cloud environments. More recently, Cisco last month introduced a software tool called Service Mesh Manager aimed at easing the maintenance of Kubernetes environments.  

Image: TriggerMesh