The $10 Million Cloud Club: 10 Well-Funded Cloud Computing Vendors

Cloud Vendors Get Big Funding Boosts

Cloud computing vendors are raising significant amounts of money to develop and build their cloud offerings. From infrastructure and storage to platforms and software, vendors playing in the cloud are receiving funding at a rapid clip, a sign that investors are hot in this growing industry.

The past few months have been particularly active in the cloud computing funding space, with several vendors getting multi-million dollar financial injections. Here, we take a look at some big winners when it comes to cloud computing funding.

Box.net

Cloud collaboration and content management player Box.net in February snagged $48 million in additional capital that it plans to use to transform how organizations manage business information in the cloud. The Series D funding round was led by Maritech Capital Partners with new investment firms Andreessen Horowitz and Emergence Capital Partners joining previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The financing includes $38 million in equity from the new and existing investors, along with a $10 million commitment from Hercules TGC.

Virtustream

Last month, Virtustream added an additional $9.75 million (just shy of $10 million) in venture capital funding, bringing its total to a whopping $49.35 million. The cloud services and next-generation infrastructure provider plans to use the additional boost to expand its product offerings and deliver new channel-focused offerings to support its enterprise cloud play. The company also plans to continue innovating around its next generation of hypervisor-independent cloud provisioning solutions. The funding comes about a year after Virtustream introduced its xStream dynamic cloud platform that supports on-premise, off-premise or hybrid cloud deployments.

DynamicOps

Burlington, Mass.-based DynamicOps in February closed $11 million in Series B venture funding led by Sierra Ventures, with Next World Capital participating, joining Credit Suisse's Next II venture group in ownership. DynamicOps makes private cloud automation software, dubbed the DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center platform that provides automated delivery and management of on-demand IT services, enabling enterprise orchestration of service delivery in private and public clouds.

Eucalyptus Systems

In June 2010, Eucalyptus Systems brought in a fresh $20 million investment to continue developing its enterprise private and hybrid cloud computing management platform based on open source. Coupled with its previous $5.5 million funding round, Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Eucalyptus has said it will use the $20 million Series B funding bump to grow its engineering team to gain a stronghold in the enterprise cloud market.

Skytap

In January, Skytap secured a $10 million purse to help it bulk up its cloud automation presence. The $10 million Series C round of funding was led by OpenView Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation.

At the time, Skytap said its plans were to use the funds to pump up sales and marketing efforts, and the channel will play a big role.

RightScale

RightScale secured $25 million in funding last September, funds the company said it would use to fuel cloud computing innovation, hire sales and engineering staff and make the strategic investment in its channel.

RightScale's $25 million funding injection came after two rounds yielded roughly $22 million for 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.

At the time RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said the company would 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.

Nimbula

Nimbula didn't waste any time filling its accounts with funds. The company came out of stealth mode late last year, after being founded in 2009 with a $5.75 million series A funding round, and Nimbula quickly secured another $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding. Nimbula, the brainchild of two former Amazon Web Services executives, makes Nimbula Director, a cloud computing operating system that manages both on-premise and off-premise cloud IT resources in a customer-controlled infrastructure.

Nimbula put its money to work by funding innovation around its hybrid cloud computing technologies and to drive market adoption of its product to manage on- and off-premises infrastructure.

Nirvanix

In November, Nirvanix brought in an additional cash infusion of $10 million from investors Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures; money the company put to use growing market penetration for its cloud storage plays. The $10 million boost followed $5 million raised in 2009, which at the time brought San Diego-based Nirvanix's total funding to $23 million.

Cloudera

Cloudera, which provides Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, secured $25 million in a Series C financing in October led by Meritech Capital Partners with participation from current investors, Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. That pushed Cloudera's total funding to $36 million and the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said the money would be used to invest in product development and services to support growth and adoption of Hadoop by enterprise organizations.

Joyent

In September, Joyent brought in $15 million in funding led by Intel Capital Investments, money that the IaaS and PaaS player leveraged to expand internationally and continue to build upon its core cloud computing offerings.