HPE Joins Investors In OpenStack Startup Platform9's $22 Million Funding Round

Platform9, a startup that's seen spectacular growth over the last year by delivering on-premises OpenStack-based infrastructure, managed by a cloud software layer, revealed on Wednesday that it had closed another funding round.

The $22 million Series C round, led by Canvas Ventures, with HPE also participating, will allow Platform9 to continue scaling a business that's grown by 300 percent in revenue last year, with a 360 percent expansion of its customer base, CEO Sirish Raghuram told CRN.

"That's all been driven by where the market is today," Raghuram said. "Enterprises are struggling to navigate the journey to the cloud. You have a lot of legacy VMware environments, developers using multiple public clouds, and trying to bring that agility to all of your deployments, all fragmented in individual silos."

[Related: A Higher Gear: OpenStack Startup Platform9 Launches Channel Program]

Enterprises want an easier way to operate hybrid environments built from open source technologies, he said.

"Our product is resonating with what the market needs today," he said. That's "support for VM-based workloads with OpenStack, and containers with Kubernetes, that works across any hardware."

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startups delivers Kubernetes, the container orchestration technology first developed at Google, much like it does the OpenStack cloud operating system: through a Software-as-a-Service model.

That approach gives partners a portable, turnkey solution they can use to deploy two popular technologies often hampered in the channel by their operational complexity, according to Raghuram.

Platform9 is running 205 enterprise clouds across OpenStack and Kubernetes, the company's CEO said. That relationship allows the company to detect problems with customer environments even before the customer see anything is wrong.

The HPE investment is of particular importance, Raghuram told CRN.

While HPE sold off its OpenStack assets to SUSE, CEO Meg Whitman "has been very clear making hybrid easy is very important to them," Raghuram said.

Daryl Harrington, practice manager of cloud solutions at Groupware Technology, a Platform9 partner based in Campbell, Calif., told CRN his company increasingly sees the strain on DevOps teams at businesses trying to manage cloud-native environments.

"Our customers need easy, scalable solutions that can run across the multitude of cloud environments they’re running," Harrington told CRN. "This isn’t easy to do when many vendors don’t provide integrations with other cloud ecosystems."

Partnering with Platform9 enabled Groupware to quickly and easily deploy, manage and maintain hybrid clouds across infrastructures for the company's customers.

"IT teams are then free to focus on solving core business problems instead,’ he said.