Code 42 Software, provider of online backup solutions for consumers and enterprises, finalized a capital raise of $52.5 million from Accel Partners and Split Rock Partners. The capital raise represents Accel’s first investment out of its $100 million fund for Big Data companies. Founded in 2001, Code 42 Software has been profitable for the last three years as reported by GigaOM. The Minneapolis-based company’s products include Crash Plan for consumers, Crash Plan PRO for small businesses and Crash Plan PROe for enterprises. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Dornquast noted that the funding raise was unusual given the profitability of the company, which had bootstrapped its financing in the initial years of its operation. The funding will be used to grow the business globally and add additional features that render it easier for users to more effectively search and manage access privileges to their online backup repositories. Currently, Code 42 manages more than 100 petabytes of data and backs up 250 million new files per day. Although Accel had been pursuing Code 42 for two years, the company finally decided to take in the funding raise upon recognizing possibilities for enterprise level business intelligence analytics on files shared between devices and within an ecosystem and the market opportunity to expand globally. Code 42 competes with the likes of Carbonite, Mozy, Iron Mountain, Box.net and Dropbox. The company currently has more than 4000 enterprise customers including Adobe, Google, Groupon, HP, Intuit, Kraft Foods, LinkedIn, NASA, National Geographic and Salesforce.com.
Category: Venture Capital
Puppet Labs Secures $8.5 Million in Series C Funding With New Investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware
Puppet Labs announced the closure of a Series C funding round valued at $8.5 million. As a result of the funding raise, new investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners. Since its formation in 2005, the company has now raised a total of $15.75 million. The new round of funding is intended to support a market in which “demand for our products is outstripping our ability to satisfy it through organic growth alone,” according to Puppet’s CEO Luke Kanies. Kanies further noted that VMware, Google and Cisco represented ideal partners to accelerate the adoption of its IT automation and management software because of their deep relationships in the virtualization, cloud computing and IT vendor landscape.
Puppet Labs provides software that enables system administrators to effectively manage increasingly heterogeneous IT environments featuring legacy systems, private clouds, virtual machines and public clouds, all of which collectively serve the needs of multiple constituencies with varying application needs and role-based access privileges. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 delivers a visually intuitive graphical interface that enables system administrators to discover existing resources, benchmark resource utilization against a desired baseline, configure and deploy new resources to increase scale, and launch critical updates, all within a matter of seconds, without adding headcount. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 also features provisioning capability for Amazon EC2 and VMware instances as well as unauthorized access and change of setting tracking for compliance purposes.
The Series C funding raise marks the culmination of a momentous year for the company. Puppet Labs outgrew its open source roots in January with the launch of the first commercial edition of its product, Puppet Enterprise. In September, the company launched Puppet Enterprise 2.0 and now claims over 250 customers including Twitter, Zynga, Oracle/Sun, Match.com and Constant Contact.
Karim Faris, partner at Google Ventures, remarked on the promise of Puppet Labs and its recent investment as follows:
“Global companies need efficient solutions to manage their on-premise and cloud infrastructures. The Puppet Labs team has demonstrated the market traction and leadership to capitalize on this tremendous opportunity, and we’re looking forward to working with them to grow the business.”
The widespread commercial interest in Puppet Labs underscores the need for technology to manage increasingly complex IT environments that feature a combination of traditional and cloud based applications. The success of Puppet Labs over the past year suggests that, alongside cloud security and mobile device management, Puppet’s specialization in technology orchestration and management increasingly ranks as one of the auxiliary technologies likely to mushroom alongside the proliferation of virtualization and cloud computing in contemporary enterprise IT environments.
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