The containerization platform startup founded by Solomon Hykes was Docker.
Solomon Hykes started the Docker project while working at dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service company. Docker was first shown publicly at PyCon in 2013 and released as open-source software that March, making application containers much easier for developers to build, ship, and run consistently.
Docker containers package an application with much of its software environment while sharing the host operating system’s kernel. That makes them generally lighter and faster to start than full virtual machines. Docker’s tooling also popularized images, Dockerfiles, registries, and repeatable development workflows.
A common mix-up is treating Docker and Kubernetes as the same product. Docker packages and runs containers; Kubernetes is a separate orchestration system for managing containerized workloads across clusters. Another historical detail is that Docker initially used LXC, then replaced it with its own libcontainer component in version 0.9.
The company behind the project was originally dotCloud, founded in 2008. It changed its name to Docker in 2013.