Container management software company Rancher Labs Inc. closed on a $40 million late-stage round of funding Monday, it said. The round was led by Telstra Ventures and Telstra Corp., and brings Rancher’s total funding to $95 million to date.

Rancher Labs said the company plans to use the Series D funding to drive what it has termed a “run Kubernetes everywhere” strategy that involves bringing the container orchestration software to new markets that need to run workloads closer to the network edge.

Prior to today’s funding, Rancher Labs last year launched a lightweight Kubernetes distribution called K3s that’s meant to address growing demand for smaller of clusters of software containers that run on x86, Arm64 and Armv7 processors in edge computing environments. At the time, the company said it created K3S because existing Kubernetes distributions are too complex and memory-intensive for edge scenarios, where information is processed onsite rather than in a remote data center.

Software containers are used to host software that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure without making changes to its underlying code. Kubernetes, meanwhile, is the most popular tool for managing clusters of those containers.

K3s is essentially a stripped-down version of Kubernetes that removes lots of nonessential parts, including old application programming interface groups, nondefault admission controllers and storage drivers. Users can still add any parts they need, but these are not included by default. The distribution also minimizes memory usage by consolidating the processes that run on Kubernetes servers into a single one.

The software has been well-received in the enterprise, if Rancher’s numbers are to be believed. In 2019, the company saw its revenue grow by 169% year-over-year, though it didn’t provide absolute numbers, while its platform now boasts more than 30,000 active users, including 350 enterprise customers.

What’s more, the opportunity for Rancher Labs to grow further looks good. A recent survey by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation found that 84% of companies are running containers in production this year, and that most of those are using Kubernetes to manage them.

The Kubernetes marketplace has of course seen some significant consolidation in the last year, with heavyweight firms like VMware Inc. acquiring specialists such as Heptio Inc. and Pivotal Software Inc. and declaring that it’s “all in” on Kubernetes, and IBM Corp. buying up Red Hat Inc.

Rancher Labs might be far smaller than those rivals, but the company’s Chief Executive Officer Sheng Liang (pictured) told ZDNet in an interview today that startup’s container offering stands apart from the competition due to its multi-cluster, cloud-agnostic, heterogeneous management approach. The company is now going after edge computing use cases, which remain a “total blank space”, Liang said.

The idea is to work closely with enterprises to build solutions for specific markets including 5G, digital factories, connected cars, video surveillance and medical research, Liang said. For example, Rancher’s new investor Telstra Corp., is using the company’s software to support its contact centers, customer network and services provisioning. It will also use Rancher’s platform to roll out its first 5G deployments

Rancher Labs said the new funds will also be used to expand the company’s sales, marketing, finance, operations and customer support teams. The company also hopes to expand beyond the 14 countries it currently operates in.

Liang appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, earlier this month, when he talked more about the company’s K3S platform:

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