RightScale Locks In $25 Million Cloud Investment

The $25 million third round injection comes after two rounds yielded roughly $22 million for the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based RightScale, which offers a cloud management platform that rides atop the public and private cloud infrastructures of others like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Eucalyptus Systems and others.

"It does reflect, from 30,000 feet up, the huge confidence in infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud computing, and RightScale specifically," RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said of the funding, which was led by Tenaya Capital and joined by DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures.

According to Crandell, RightScale will put the fresh $25 million to work to accelerate the development of its RightScale Cloud Management Platform, drive the company's global expansion and grow its ecosystem of third-party publishers.

The financing will help RightScale hire a host of new employees, many of which will focus on the sales, engineering and services both domestically and to serve in new geographies, Crandell said.

"Expanding globally involves building up sales, engineering and services in different locations," he said.

Investing in a channel ecosystem is also a strategic investment RightScale plans to make. The latest round of funding will be put to work bringing aboard an arsenal of ISVs that will publish and develop software in the cloud and across multiple clouds on RightScale's platform, and systems integrators that will deliver professional services and implement and deliver on cloud infrastructures.

RightScale got its start in 2006 rallying around Amazon EC2, and more cloud providers quickly emerged. RightScale was built to support multiple clouds, and now it supports many of the leaders in cloud computing by talking to cloud infrastructure delivered as APIs. The financing will also enable RightScale to expand to support more clouds.

"In the blink of an eye, other clouds have sprung up," Crandell said.