Platform9, which describes itself as an “open distributed cloud company,” announced today that it closed a $26 million funding round led by Celesta Capital with participation from Cota Capital, NGP Capital and other investors. Chief Executive Officer Bhaskar Gorti said the new cash will be used to drive Platform9’s go-to-market strategy and product research and development, particularly as the company looks to scale enterprise implementations. larger tissue.
Platform9 was founded by Sirish Raghuram, Madhura Maskasky, Bich Le and Roopak Parikh, who worked together to create a number of virtualization products in the early years. Their hypothesis was that open source ecosystems would evolve to provide a variety of services in the cloud, but businesses needed a simpler way to operate them. One recently The McKinsey report suggests that less than 25% of cloud initiatives meet their time-to-market and cost goals.
On the surface, Platform9 delivers on this by allowing developers to run Kubernetes – the open source platform for standalone workload management – and other cloud-native technologies on distributed cloud services. canopy. It works with existing infrastructure to create native cloud clusters that come with monitoring features and integration with third-party tools. Here, “cluster” refers to a collection of worker machines, called nodes, that run “contained” applications with the dependencies and services needed to run them.
Platform9 provides several tools to help manage clusters running in the cloud, whether in the public cloud or on-premises. Image credits: Platform9
Using Platform9, developers can install, operate, and maintain assemblies remotely through the software-as-a-service management plane. Its capabilities include automatic security patching, on-demand upgrades, and “self-healing” clusters, as well as multiverse support and audit logging.
According to Gorti, Platform9’s service powers 40,000 nodes across private, public, and edge clouds.
“To create a more open cloud experience, Platform9’s co-founders researched emerging open source work in the infrastructure space, including Apache CloudStack, OpenStack, LXD, and Kubernetes,” Gorti continued. “They were inspired by the nimble developers achieved using public clouds, but wanted to challenge the assumption that this could only be achieved by confining businesses to one region. walled garden.
While Gorti declined to discuss revenue, he said that Platform9 — with $100 million in funding to date — now has more than 60 enterprise customers and 120 employees. The business grew 100% from 2021 to 2022 while net revenue retention, which is gross revenue minus discontinuation revenue (e.g. contract expiration, contract cancellation, and downgrade) level), an increase of 132%.
In addition to the financing, Mountain View, California-based Platform9 announced two executive team appointments: Emilia A’Bell and Ravi Jacob. A’Bell comes from business executive positions at Oracle and Nokia, while Jacob was previously CVP at Intel.
