Cisco buys Kubernetes start-up Banzai Cloud to fuel cloud-native connectivity

Cisco is continuing to build its cloud-native war chest with a deal to buy Kubernetes startup Banzai Cloud.

Monday's deal for Budapest, Hungary-based Banzai cloud followed on the heels of Cisco's October acquisition of Israel-based cloud-native vendor Portshift for a reported $100 million. Banzai Cloud was founded three years ago and has raised a total of $2.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

The financial terms for the Banzai Cloud deal weren't available. Cisco expects it to close at the end of its fiscal second quarter.

In a blog post, Cisco's Liz Centoni, senior vice president of emerging technologies and incubation, said the addition of Banzai Cloud would accelerate the company's efforts in cloud-native while also complimenting the Portshift deal.

Centoni said the Banzai Cloud team would join Cisco's Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, where it will focus on incubating new projects for cloud-native networking, security and edge computing environments for modern distributed applications.

"This (Banzai) team has demonstrated experience with complete end-to-end cloud-native application development, deployment, runtime and security workflows," Centoni said. "They have built and deployed software tools that solve critical real-world pain points and are active participants in the open-source community as sponsors, contributors and maintainers of several open-source projects."

Portshift brought cloud-native application security capabilities, as well as expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes environments, into the Cisco fold.

"These two cross-border acquisitions are a testament to the globalization of the cloud-native ecosystem and underscore our commitment to hybrid, multi-cloud application-first infrastructure as the de facto mode of operating IT," Centoni said.

RELATED: Raynovich—Cisco bounces back in Q1

Last week Cisco reported its fiscal first quarter earnings, which included a 9% year-over-year decline in revenue. Cisco reported earnings of 76 cents per share vs. the 70 cents per share expected by analysts, according to Wall Street projections. Revenue was $11.93 billion versus the 11.85 billion expected by analysts, according to research firm Refinitiv.

Cisco shares rose as much as 8% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company reported an upbeat first fiscal quarter of 2021.