Another week, another container startup announcing a big round of funding. San Francisco-based CoreOS Inc. has secured a $28 million investment from a group of high-profile backers led by Alphabet Inc.’s private equity arm, GV, to promote its implementation of the lightweight virtualization technology.

The cash infusion represents the latest milestone in its rapid rise to the front of the container movement over the past three years. CoreOS got its start by creating an open-source Linux distribution optimized for Docker Inc.’s rivaling implementation, which set off the whole trend and dominated the agenda back in the day as a result. It was only natural for the then-emerging operating system maker to fall in line behind the technology’s standard-beared alongside the rest of the industry, but as adoption took off, it started developing bigger ambitions.

And so rkt, CoreOS’ competing containerization engine, was born. The tool attempts to set itself apart by providing advanced security functionality not available as part of Docker, like the ability to set different levels of protection depending on the severity of the threats at hand. An instance can insulated from its peers using the SELinux kernel module, or deployed in a virtual machine for complete isolation at the expense of some performance overhead  Users also have the option of going a step further and blocking the execution of certain commands that might enable a malicious application to bypass the software’s controls.

Since the launch of rkt last year, CoreOS has rolled out several complementary tools including Clair, an open-source vulnerability scanner capable of automatically examining a deployment for common security flaws. And in an effort to court enterprises, the company also sells its individual solutions as part of an integrated bundle called Tectonic that provides a number of value-added management features on top. The capital from today’s funding round will be used to develop new functionality for the suite and hire more salespeople in an effort to boost adoption.

The cash infusion couldn’t have come at a better time. CoreOS not only has to compete with Docker, which offers its own automation capabilities, but also a startup called Rancher Inc. that similarly makes its living simplifying the management of container clusters. The latter outfit even even has its own container-optimized Linux distribution called RancherOS, which is starting to garner serious attention in the marketplace.

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