The team behind one of the most promising technologies in the Docker ecosystem celebrated a $5 million capital infusion from a venerable venture capital firm by re-branding yesterday and pledging to push Docker into the enterprise mainstream.

U.K.-based Weaveworks Inc. (formerly Zettio Ltd.) is the brainchild of Alexis Richardson and Matthias Radestock, the engineers behind the open-source RabbitMQ message broker which is now maintained by Pivotal Software Inc. It hit the industry radar just over a month ago with the launch of project called Weave that helps enterprise IT organizations manage the proliferation of Docker containers.

Containers are a lightweight alternative to conventional virtual machines that are portable and easy to deploy. But those strengths turn into debilitating weaknesses at large scale. The resource-efficiency of Docker, coupled with the growing trend of splitting up applications into modular “microservices,” can create scenarios in which organizations have to manage tens of thousands of containers.

That’s what Weave hopes to to simplify. The technology connects containers to a virtual switch that serves as a single point of contact with external processes, automatically adjusting applications for changes in the network topology and thereby eliminating the need to individually manage containers. It competes with Rudder, a similar solution developed at CoreOS, which launched homegrown alternative to Docker on Tuesday.

The new $5 million funding round marks a major victory for both Weaveworks and the broader Docker camp. The biggest chunk of the financing comes from Accel Partners, which has a reputation for spotting potential, having previously backed Facebook Inc., Dropbox Inc. and many other Silicon Valley success stories.

Weaveworks will spend the new capital, which brings its total raised to $6 million, on hiring more engineers and establish a bigger presence across the pond in the US, where most of the activity around containers is occurring today.

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