This morning, Mirantis, a container management platform known for its OpenStack days and its 2019 acquisition of Docker Enterprise, revealed that it has acquired Shipa, a business that creates software to aid in the creation, distribution, and administration of cloud-native apps. A seed round of $3.75 million was previously secured by Shipa in 2020, with Engineering Capital and Jump Capital serving as the primary backers. According to Mirantis, the purchase price ranged from $10 million to $30 million (in both cash and stock).

In order to assist organisations speed up the delivery of cloud-native applications, Mirantis aims to include Shipa into its Lens platform. Like Shipa, Lens attempts to simplify the process of developing, deploying, monitoring, and debugging cloud-native apps on Kubernetes by offering a unified environment for these activities. It seems that Mirantis was most interested in Shipa’s security and governance features, as well as its update management tools. The two organisations are also trying to integrate their respective platforms; a first integration of Lens into the Lens Desktop is scheduled for the month of March. Additionally, Shipa will be included into the firm’s Mirantis Kubernetes Engine.

According to Bruno Andrade, Shipa’s co-founder and CEO, “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.” By freeing up developers to concentrate on their expertise rather than the underlying infrastructure, our solution streamlines the process of deploying and managing apps and upgrades.

Andrade, along with co-founder and vice president of engineering Vivek Pandey, and the rest of the Shipa team, will be joining Mirantis.

“Shipa’s technology puts ground-breaking application discovery, optimization, security and administration capabilities in the hands of Lens users,” said Adrian Ionel, CEO and co-founder of Mirantis.

Mirantis claims that 50% of Fortune 100 organisations are using Lens, and that it has a current installed base of one million users. Lens is accessible as an open-source software (at least for the core of its features).

Though Mirantis isn’t exactly on a buying spree, it did buy amazee.io in July 2022. amazee.io is another service that aids developers in deploying cloud-native apps.

Ashmeet Sidana, founder and chief engineer of Engineering Capital, and other early backers of Shipa, are now shareholders in Mirantis. “We were the first investors in Shipa’s notion of application infrastructure-as-code,” Sidana stated. “Mirantis has an excellent history of making acquisitions, and we think Shipa is a great fit with Mirantis’ goal of making Kubernetes easier to use by streamlining the observability and administration of applications. It will be exciting to see the two ideas come together and become reality.