OpenStack Vendor Mirantis Raises $100M In Series B Funding And Sets Record For Open Source Investment

Mirantis recently announced $100M in Series B funding in a round led by Insight Venture Partners. August Capital and existing investors Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, Ericsson, and Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures). The investment marks the largest Series B funding round in the history of open source software. As a result of the funding raise, Insight Venture Partners Managing Director, Alex Crisses, will join the Mirantis board of directors. Crisses remarked on the investment as follows:

OpenStack adoption is accelerating worldwide, driven by the need for low cost, scalable cloud infrastructure. 451 Research estimates a market size of $3.3 billion by 2018. Mirantis delivers on OpenStack’s promise of cloud computing at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional IT vendors, and without the compromise of vendor lock-in. Their customer traction has been phenomenal.

Mirantis intends to use the funding to accelerate product development and enhance its international expansion to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The Mountain View-based company has helped over 130 companies implement OpenStack and claims bragging rights to the largest OpenStack deal to date in the form of a five year licensing agreement with Ericsson. The company has experienced meteoric growth in recent years with revenue increasing from $1M a month to $1M a week. With an extra $100M in the bank, Mirantis is enviably positioned to deliver one of the most productized, turnkey distributions of OpenStack on the marketplace and to subsequently assume a leadership spot in the intensifying battle for OpenStack market share. Notably, the Series B funding raise also enables Mirantis to increase its contributions to the OpenStack community and assert more influence on the direction of the open source IaaS collaboration. Whatever comes next, however, the $100M investment represents a watershed moment in the history of open source computing and suggests that open source may well hold the key to the larger future of software and IT infrastructure services more generally.