Cloud computing company Joyent announced that it had successfully secured $85 million in venture capital funding today. The European group Weather Investment II led the round. Weather Investment II was advised by Accelero Capital, who also participated in the funding raise. Telefonica Digital contributed to the funding raise as a strategic investor. Speaking of the capital raise, Joyent CEO and founder David Young remarked: “Having worked with customers around the world, we see the demand for consistent global services regardless of how many countries our customers are operating in. This funding will enable Joyent to build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients.” The funding is intended to enable Joyent to develop global operations marked by the delivery of public clouds on every continent. Joyent’s SmartDataCenter software provides the technological infrastructure for the delivery of high performance public, private and hybrid clouds. Customers can use Joyent’s SmartDataCenter to create private clouds for their own operations or public clouds for use by third parties.
In May 2011, for example, Joyent revealed details of an alliance with ClusterTech whereby ClusterTech would become the provider of public cloud services to companies in the gaming, media, mobile and social media space in China. Under this arrangement, ClusterTech provisioned Joyent’s cloud computing SmartDataCenter software to service providers that licensed Joyent’s cloud computing technology to media, gaming and mobile companies in China. In licensing its cloud computing software to a third party distributor, Joyent leverages a business model that differs markedly from most of its U.S. competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace that retain control over the deployment of their cloud computing operating systems. Joyent’s existing investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global.
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