Some­times it feels like we’re writ­ing the same arti­cle again and again because it’s always about some tech com­pa­ny rais­ing a gazil­lion dol­lars. Well, there is noth­ing new here, except that this two year old com­pa­ny is aggres­sive­ly try­ing to dom­i­nate a mar­ket. Dock­er, who, Work at DOCKER?

A light­ning pro­duc­er of soft­ware for man­ag­ing appli­ca­tions on a glob­al basis. They’ve cre­at­ed a sig­na­ture appli­ca­tion con­tain­er tech­nol­o­gy, and they are doing every­thing in their pow­er to make sure all the oth­er kids in the play­ground have to go home early.

Dock­er has seen four injec­tions of mon­ey since incep­tion and this most recent one of $95 mil­lion should real­ly allow them to blow past all their com­peti­tors, such as Core­OS, anoth­er upstart. So we’re look­ing at a total of close to $160 mil­lion in fund­ing. Last Sep­tem­ber in 2014 the com­pa­ny was val­ued at close to $400 mil­lion, this year it’s pos­si­ble it’s val­ue could be a bil­lion dol­lars. Think­ing about sub­mit­ting those resumes now, or later?

Ben­jamin Gol­ub, Docker’s chief exec­u­tive said Dock­er still hasn’t spent all of the mon­ey from its sec­ond round of financ­ing, let alone the $40 mil­lion it raised in its third round of fund­ing last Sep­tem­ber. But Docker’s chief exec­u­tive down­played the impor­tance of the new mon­ey. “We need to be pre­pared to add jobs at Dock­er, add fea­tures, and add func­tion­al­i­ty that enter­pris­es are ask­ing for – net­work­ing, stor­age, addi­tion­al secu­ri­ty,” he said.

All this mon­ey is a good indi­ca­tor of what tech com­pa­nies feel is urgent­ly need­ed out there in tech land. Here’s what all the hoopla is about, “con­tain­ers”. It is a the­o­ret­i­cal box which allows soft­ware engi­neers and devel­op­ers to take their soft­ware and pack it up into for­mat that lets it run prac­ti­cal­ly any­where. So with­out any new cod­ing or third par­ty tools you can put the con­tain­er in a com­pa­ny’s own data cen­ter or in a cloud ser­vice run by some­body else, and it’s sup­posed to work.

What is inter­est­ing is that this wasn’t the main mis­sion of Dock­er, but since open sourc­ing the soft­ware it has become one of the fastest-grow­ing pieces of busi­ness soft­ware ever. The mon­ey mak­ing part is the upgrad­ing to pre­mi­um ver­sions with all the bells and whis­tles to man­age the soft­ware. Dock­er is bet­ting that this mar­ket con­tin­ues to grow and con­tain­ers are most def­i­nite­ly a grow­ing mar­ket. If they can cap­i­tal­ize on its pop­u­lar­i­ty and sell the tools to make it work at large scales, they will dominate.

All the major cloud com­pa­nies are try­ing to sup­port Dock­er right now. Dock­er con­tain­ers let devel­op­ers stack their soft­ware in a super-effi­cient way, sav­ing their cus­tomers time and mon­ey on things like servers. If the appli­ca­tions can run more effi­cient­ly, cus­tomers have to pay less for their month­ly cloud bill. Accord­ing to the press release the ven­ture mon­ey will go towards mak­ing the tech­nol­o­gy work more effi­cient­ly on Ama­zon (find jobs at Ama­zon), Microsoft, and IBM clouds. If only we could all live in the clouds, right?