Open-source software-as-a-service provider Instaclustr Pty Ltd. is getting some more financial help with a $15 million “growth equity investment” from New York-based Level Equity.

The company said today that the funding round, its biggest to date, will help it expand its platform of managed open-source technologies and double its roster of staff.

Instaclustr is a fairly interesting player in the enterprise software space. Unlike other companies of its kind that usually throw all their weight behind a single open-source software project, Instaclustr provides hosting and managed services for a wide range of freely available software.

Via its “Open Source-as-a-Service platform,” the company supports big-name projects such as Apache Cassandra, Apache Spark, Apache Lucene and ScyllaDB, among others. Most recently, the company added the Apache Kafka stream-processing software that was first built by LinkedIn Corp. as a managed service.

The basic premise of Instaclustr’s managed offerings is that these open source software projects, while extremely useful for enterprises, can be incredibly difficult to set up and keep up and running. Instaclustr takes away these headaches by providing both the “data capabilities” and the reliability companies need to scale these platforms.

Instaclustr Chief Executive Peter Nichol told SiliconANGLE at the time it added support for Kafka that the company’s goal is to “build a comprehensive platform of open-source technologies focused on the data layer” that includes storage, analytics, search and messaging components.

The company now has these basic ingredients in place, and with the new capital is looking to expand its platform by providing additional options for its customers. To that end, Instaclustr is looking to add support for Apache Flink, an alternative to Spark, as well as Elasticsearch, which is an enterprise search engine based on Apache Lucene, and Apache Ignite, a distributed database, caching and processing platform designed to store and compute on large volumes of data across clusters of nodes.

Instaclustr Chief Product Officer Ben Slater said the company was eyeing these platforms next based on customer demand for them. He said Elasticsearch was a “key technology” that has already been widely deployed by its customer base, and many of these have asked for the service to be managed.

“Apache Flink has an emerging reputation as a particularly robust production stream processing engine, and we feel Apache Ignite fills needs for caching and a fast, distributed file system,” Slater added. “Our philosophy is that we choose open source technologies that work well together and that can power the most ambitious applications.”

The company plans to add support for these platforms sometime in the next year, Slater said.

Image: Instaclustr