Docker Inc. Chief Executive Steve Singh is stepping down and will hand over the reins to former Hortonworks Inc. CEO Rob Bearden, the company announced today.

Singh will remain at the helm until early June to help with the transition. He’ll continue serving as chairman of the board once the leadership change becomes official. The executive is leaving Docker after a two-year stint during which he significantly grew the company’s headcount and revenue, setting it up for a potential public offering during Bearden’s tenure.

Singh joined Docker in 2017, when the startup was already a well-known name in the technology world but had little revenue to show for it. Docker struggled to find ways of monetizing its open-source software container platform, which facilitates the development of portable applications that can run on many different types of infrastructure. The startup’s annual revenue at the time was reportedly a modest “tens of millions” of dollars.

Singh, who led his previous company, Concur Technologies, to an $8.3 billion exit, implemented an aggressive monetization strategy when he came aboard as CEO. A year after taking up the post, he stopped by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio for an interview and revealed that “we’ve literally doubled our enterprise customer base year-over-year.”

The executive said at the time that Docker had built up a paying customer base of more than 500 enterprises. In  the following year, Docker increased that number by 50 percent and introduced new commercial products to make money from the strong enterprise adoption of containers.  

Offering a glimpse into the startup’s growth roadmap, Singh told SiliconANGLE at the time that “as our customers are moving their legacy apps to Docker and running them on new infrastructure, sometimes public cloud, and cutting costs, they’re starting to take that cost savings and apply it to next-generation apps. So they’re now using Docker for new apps.”

More recently, Singh told TechCrunch last week that Docker is on track to achieve a positive free cash flow by the end of the year. He said that this will allow the startup to press ahead without having to raise any more outside funding and indicated the long-term plan is an initial public offering.

However, Docker has been seen by some as having lost ground to Kubernetes, the Google LLC-developed and now open-source container orchestration software that has taken off quickly in enterprises.

Singh is leaving Docker in experienced hands as it enters this new phase of growth. Incoming CEO Bearden led Hortonworks through its IPO and, just last October, a merger with rival big-data firm Cloudera Inc. that created a company with more than $720 million in annual revenues. Earlier, Bearden served as chief operating officer at development tooling providers SpringSource Inc. and JBoss Inc., which were both sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Photo: SiliconANGLE