NGINX Raises $43M in Series C Funding

NGINX, Inc., the company based on the popular open source project and offering a suite of technologies designed to develop and deliver modern applications, has raised $43 million in Series C funding led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity (GS Growth), a platform within Goldman Sachs' Merchant Banking Division. NGINX has experienced tremendous growth and customer traction, including adoption by more than 30% of the Fortune 50. With this latest round, NGINX will accelerate its mission to help enterprises on their journey to microservices – a modern approach to application development. The Series C brings NGINX's total funding to $103 million.

"As a former IT executive, I've seen what it takes to manage enterprise applications at scale. We took a hard look at many of the emerging vendors helping enterprises scale and modernize their applications. We invested in NGINX for three key reasons," says David Campbell, a Managing Director in Goldman Sachs' Merchant Banking Division who will join the NGINX board of directors as part of the investment. "First, NGINX is a globally recognized technology leader with a pervasive footprint and adoption by more than half of the busiest websites in the world. Secondly, we believe NGINX's open source approach and participation in the Linux ecosystem gives them unique advantage over the traditional proprietary appliance business models. And critically, the NGINX management team has the proven experience it takes to execute and gain commercial traction."

Digital transformation is fueling disruption across every major industry, as enterprises must leverage new technologies, adopt innovative business models, and deliver superior customer experiences in order to maintain competitive advantage. According to Gartner Research, forty-seven percent of CEOs said they are being challenged by the board of directors to make progress in digital business. Yet Gartner goes on to predict that by 2023, while 90% of current applications will still be in use, most will have received insufficient modernization investment. Application modernization is imperative to achieving successful digital outcomes and drives increased enterprise adoption of microservices architecture to complement legacy applications and support evolving application demands. NGINX is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity and help enterprises at each step of the modernization journey – a market projected to reach $32.01 billion by 2023 and growing at more than 16% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

"We're excited to welcome Goldman Sachs as we believe they're the right partner to support us in driving adoption of the NGINX Application Platform and extending our leadership in microservices enablement," said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX. "In the last 18 months, NGINX has introduced six new technologies to the platform to accelerate the modernization of our customers' application infrastructure. Goldman Sachs brings real world experience managing mission critical applications (both legacy and new), which will help us further accelerate our platform vision."

As one of the most successful open source projects in the world, NGINX has evolved from a single project into an application delivery platform that includes a suite of eight open source and commercial software solutions. In its first four years, the company has:

Captured 400 million websites globally, which is one-third of all websites. This includes two-thirds of the 10,000 busiest and most demanding sites.
Grown to more than 1,500 customers. Three of the five largest global banks, three of the five largest US retails, and five of the 10 largest technology companies trust NGINX.
Achieved 100 percent year-over-year growth for four straight years. NGINX is focused on maintaining a similar trajectory.
NGINX will use the new funding to:

Advance its product roadmap

NGINX will enhance its Kubernetes Ingress controller, Istio service mesh, and API gateway solutions. NGINX will also introduce a commercial version of Unit, a dynamic web and application server, and Controller, a centralized monitoring and management tool.

Expand the breadth and depth of its partner ecosystem

NGINX will expand existing partnerships in the microservices ecosystem, including platform providers AWS, Docker, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat and VMware and solution providers Datadog, New Relic, Okta, Ping Identity and Splunk.

Accelerate global expansion

NGINX will introduce a new, global channel program and open additional offices to meet increasing demand, particularly in the APAC region.

About NGINX, Inc.

NGINX, Inc. is the company behind the popular open source project trusted by more than 400 million sites. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. The NGINX Application Platform enables enterprises undergoing digital transformation to modernize legacy, monolithic applications as well as deliver new, microservices-based applications. Companies like Netflix, Starbucks, and McDonalds rely on NGINX to reduce costs, improve resiliency, and speed innovation. NGINX investors include: Blue Cloud Ventures, e.ventures, Index Ventures, Goldman Sachs, MSD Capital, NEA, Runa Capital, and Telstra Ventures.

We are headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with our EMEA head office in Cork, Ireland and APAC head office in Singapore. Learn more at https://www.nginx.com/ or join the conversation by following @nginx on Twitter.

About Goldman Sachs Growth Equity

Founded in 1869, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm. Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division (MBD) is the primary center for Goldman Sachs' long term principal investing activity. With nine offices across seven countries, MBD is one of the leading private equity investors in the world. Since 1986, the group has invested approximately $180 billion of levered capital across a number of geographies, industries and transaction types. Within MBD, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity (GS Growth) is a dedicated platform for venture capital and growth equity investments in leading companies that have built innovative technology or processes to transform their industries. Since 1994, GS Growth has partnered with more than 200 companies and invested more than $5 billion of capital across sectors including technology, software, media, healthcare IT, and business and information services. GS Growth seeks to partner with strong management teams to help companies achieve product, customer and geographic expansion. For more information about GS Growth, please visit: www.gs.com/gsgrowth.