
He spent a career watching useful infrastructure disappear behind expert-only interfaces. Portainer is Neil Cresswell’s long campaign to put the controls back where ordinary operators can reach them.
The Auckland company started by taking the migraines out of Docker. Its bigger business is selling operational control to teams that cannot afford to make every employee a Kubernetes expert.
It bet on OpenStack, bought Docker Enterprise, and now wants to turn your GPUs into an AI factory - all without locking you in. In August 2026, IREN bought the whole thing for $625 million.