TriggerMesh Gets Funding from Cisco

TriggerMesh, which integrates data and applications across multiple clouds and on-premises resources, has scored $5 million in a funding round led by Cisco Investments. The money, to be used to expand the company’s go-to-market strategy, is a vote in favor of TriggerMesh's “integration-as-code” approach. It could also presage a deeper relationship with Cisco.

TriggerMesh, which is included in the Futuriom 40, addresses the problems faced by enterprises looking to coordinate workloads across hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. For instance, a bank may want to draw on several disparate cloud-based sources of data to create reports. It may also need to interact with legacy on-premises applications in the headquarters data center. TriggerMesh draws data from all of these sources using a development platform based on Kubernetes and Knative (an open-source technology that manages serverless applications in Kubernetes). The result feeds reports that otherwise would take multiple distinct programming efforts to produce.

“TriggerMesh is cloud native, which means it was built for cloud infrastructure using Kubernetes and real-time event-driven architectures,” stated Mark Hinkle, CEO and co-founder of TriggerMesh, in an email to Futuriom. “However, that doesn’t preclude TriggerMesh integrating with legacy infrastructure. We can connect to on-premises applications and enterprise service buses…. In addition, we bring a DevOps style integration-as-code approach that allows users to deploy integrations via our declarative API…. We also have a low-code or visual interface for less technical users that can follow a menu-driven interface to create automations.”

TriggerMesh on Cisco’s Radar

TriggerMesh has pursued its strategy of easy integration to interact with a range of other vendors' wares. In this vein, it has been on Cisco’s radar since its founding in 2018, when at least one Cisco blogger noted that Sebastien Goasguen, the co-founder of TriggerMesh and now its head of product, had just left one of the more successful open-source serverless application projects, Kubeless, to found TriggerMesh.

“Kubeless, sponsored by Bitnami … has what might be the most comprehensive set of examples on this list, making it easy to learn,” wrote Cisco principal architect Pete Johnson. “But in perhaps what is the first sign of a shift in this market, Kubeless founder Sebastien Goasguen recently left Bitnami for a new start up called TriggerMesh, which is a ‘Knative Platform in the Cloud and On-Premise’ according to its website.”

Over time, TriggerMesh has apparently proven its worth to Cisco, which has not only invested in TriggerMesh but appears to be open to incorporating its software in at least one of its products, the Cisco Intersight platform for hybrid cloud management. Here’s how CEO Hinkle describes the relationship in a blog:

“Cisco is a leader in hybrid cloud with its Intersight platform. They are building a new, flexible toolset … that spans all of your infrastructure, workloads, and applications, wherever they are, and brings them closer to your teams to accelerate workflows without compromises. Cisco’s customers will need a way to integrate their on-premises and public cloud workloads. That’s the TriggerMesh sweet spot for Intersight users.”

TriggerMesh has found synergies with other vendors besides Cisco, including Google Cloud, Rancher Labs, and Red Hat OpenShift. In March 2021, TriggerMesh announced support for AWS EventBridge. Said CEO Hinkle in a statement: “TriggerMesh provides AWS EventBridge users an integration platform that provides a consistent method for cloud native applications to enable the flow of events from AWS to virtually any other application or service that can consume them.”

TriggerMesh Hones Its Strategy

TriggerMesh’s strategy of integration with key hybrid cloud products seems to be helping to raise its technical “silo-breaking” profile among enterprise customers and their DevOps teams. While no customers have been publicly named by TriggerMesh, the vendor boasts of many projects that have enabled customers to replace legacy systems, simplify cloud-enabled workflows, and send data across multiple locations in hybrid environments.

Still, there’s plenty of competition on the rise not only from other startups but from the vendors with which TriggerMesh has chosen to integrate. This tempts questions about the vendor’s potential as an acquisition target.

Cisco Investments was joined in this round of funding by previous investors Index Ventures and at least seven other contributors, according to an SEC filing. Index and Crane were also part of a $3 million seed round in January 2020.