AtomicJar appeared to be a high-flying early-stage firm with a substantial (in comparison to today’s standards) $25 million Series A funding round in January of last year. An open-source project that is widely used served as the foundation for constructing a commercial container testing platform, which is always a pleasant combination. It would appear that the moment had come to establish a product-market fit and get off the ground. Still, instead, the firm decided to join up with Docker, the business responsible for inventing the concept of containers.
Docker announced today that it will purchase AtomicJar and incorporate the seventeen staff into its newly formed testing division. Even though the two businesses did not negotiate the acquisition price, removing a well-capitalized company with a great deal of promise from the market was sufficient.
According to the CEO of Docker, Scott Johnston, the firm has been working on developing a comprehensive set of build, test, and deploy services on the Docker platform. These services are geared toward developers working on projects before their deployment into production. Therefore, the corporation is purchasing the testing component of this equation through the acquisition of AtomicJar.
The fact that the firm was built on top of Docker and was one of the top 10 most popular applications in the Docker marketplace did not contribute to the business’s success. According to Johnston, who spoke with TechCrunch, “Testcontainers is consistently in the top 10 as measured by pulls or downloads, with millions of pulls a month as well as [hundreds of thousands of] unique IP addresses.” Considering that test containers are pulled millions of times each month, this amounts to more than 600,000 unique monthly IP addresses.
In what specific ways does Docker benefit? In an interview with TechCrunch at the time of the Series A funding, Sergei Egorov, one of the co-founders of AtomicJar, stated that “a big testing issue for developers is that they have been using a representation of the testing components rather than the actual software, and they frequently lacked confidence that these tests were actually reproducing what would happen in a live environment.” Test containers brought about this transition by testing against actual versions of the software components dependent on them.
Since this was an intense match paired with a solid offer, Egorov decided to move forward with it. He stated that he was not aiming to sell the firm and that his investors typically urge companies at his stage to continue expanding.
“The year and market were obviously challenging, but not more challenging than for the rest of the industry, and we were well funded to continue building if we wished to, but the shorter path to liquidity combined with a strong product and cultural alignment between Docker and AtomicJar made us believe that now is the right moment for us to join forces,” Egorov told TechCrunch.
His firm gets in early, even before the company is incorporated, so it’s for an attractive price, and the decision to sell or not always lies with the founders. Ed Sim, managing partner at Boldstart and an early investor in AtomicJar, says that while he typically encourages founders to stay in it for the long haul, his firm gets in early.
His statement was as follows”: “If the founders believe that this is a good time to join forces with another company, then we are more than happy to roll through with the process, and given where we are on the cap table, it is more likely than not that we are going to do quite well, along with the founders.”
In the instance of AtomicJar, Sim stated that he and the Boldstart team were overjoyed with the transaction, and he believes that Docker is currently in the process of acquiring a solid firm. I have to tell you that all of us are excited. It was hardly enough for the firm to spend the A round. It is a small squad consisting of only 19 individuals. Therefore, he stated that this slender, mean, efficient squad is currently seeing tremendous open-source progress.”
Richard North, who was also a co-founder of AtomicJar, was the one who initially developed the Testcontainers open-source project in 2015. In the year 2021, he and Egorov established a connection in order to begin the process of constructing the commercial enterprise on top of the open-source project. This project boasts customers like Uber, Netflix, Spotify, and Capital One. The firm raised a total of $29 million before the purchase today.
