Five years after its take-off, developer platform Wercker has been acquired by database technology giant Oracle. The sum for which it is acquired has not been disclosed. Oracle (ORCL) shares were up by 0.25% following the acquisition.
Wercker is an Amsterdam-based startup that offers tools that enable developers to test and deploy code at a rapid pace. Empowering organisations to achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery goals.
Wercker was founded in 2012 by Micha Hernandez van Leuffen. Soon after its launch Wercker announced a seed funding deal of almost $1m by Tier-1 investors like Shamrock Ventures, Greylock Partners and Dutch micro VC Vitulum Ventures.
A year later, in 2014, the company raised $2.4 million. Last year a Series A round of $4.5 million followed, bringing the total funding amount to $7.9 million. The latest round was led by the largest Dutch VC-firm, Inkef Capital with €500 million under management.
The participation marked Inkef’s first investment in the developer tools market. “Wercker is core to modern cloud infrastructure and development, we’re excited to be part of its growth,”Robert Jan Galema of Inkef Capital said to StartupJuncture in an interview last year.
Core
Being ‘core’ of the modern cloud infrastructure is also what led Oracle to consider acquiring Wercker. Oracle states that the acquisition of Wercker fits in its strategy to build the leading IaaS and PaaS solutions to boost it’s cloud computing efforts.
“A leading cloud needs great tooling and adding Wercker’s container lifecycle management to Oracle’s Cloud provides engineering teams with the developer experience they deserve to build, launch and scale their applications’, Oracle states in it’s announcement about the acquisition. Adding as the rational for the acquisition: “Wercker is the industry leading solution developers turn to for building and deploying cloud-native software. Together, we will democratise developer tooling for the modern cloud.”
Deal
The deal made with Wercker also fits in the recent acquisition spree of Oracle in the fight for the cloud computing business against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM solutions and Google Cloud. Last year the company announced the acquisition of cloud-based Internet performance and DNS provider Dyn and closed its acquisition of NetSuite for $9.3 bilion. In January it announced the acquisition API platform and Apiary.
Wecker was previously part of the incubator program Rockstart Accelerator in Amsterdam. It participated in the Mozilla WebFWD program and won the Salesforce Innovation Challenge. It also won the Gigaom Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, receiving both the People’s Choice and Judge’s awards.
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