Platform9, which bills itself as an “open distributed cloud company”, announced today that it has closed a $26 million funding round led by Celesta Capital with participation from Cota Capital, NGP Capital and other investors. CEO Bhaskar Gorti said the new cash will be used to drive Platform9’s go-to-market strategy and product research and development, particularly as the company pursues larger-scale enterprise deployments. Platform9 was founded by Sirish Raghuram, Madhura Maskasky, Bich Le, and Roopak Parikh, who worked together to create several virtualization products in the early years. His hypothesis was that open source ecosystems would grow to offer a wide range of cloud offerings, but that companies needed an easier way to get them up and running. A recent McKinsey report suggests that less than 25% of cloud initiatives meet their cost and time-to-market goals. Platform9 apparently offers this by allowing developers to run Kubernetes, the open source platform for managing stand-alone workloads, and other cloud-native technologies on distributed cloud services. It works with existing infrastructure to create cloud-native clusters that come with monitoring features and integrate with third-party tools. Here, “cluster” refers to a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run “containerized” applications with the dependencies and services needed to run them.
Platform9 offers a number of tools to help manage clusters running in the cloud, whether in the public cloud or on-premises. Image credits: Platform9 With Platform9, developers can remotely install, operate, and maintain clusters through a software-as-a-service management plane. Its capabilities include automated security patching, on-demand updates, and “self-healing” clusters, as well as multi-version support and audit logging. Platform9’s service powers 40,000 nodes in private, public and edge clouds, according to Gorti. “To create a more open cloud experience, the Platform9 co-founders studied emerging open source work in the infrastructure space, including Apache CloudStack, OpenStack, LXD, and Kubernetes,” Gorti continued. “They were inspired by the agility developers gained by using public clouds, but wanted to challenge the assumption that this could only be achieved by confining businesses to a walled garden.” While Gorti declined to discuss revenue, he said that Platform9, funded to date of $100 million, currently has more than 60 enterprise customers and 120 employees. The business grew 100% from 2021 to 2022, while net revenue retention, which calculates total revenue minus revenue turnover (for example, contract expirations, cancellations, and downgrades), increased 132%. In addition to the financing, Platform9, based in Mountain View, California, announced two appointments to the executive team: Emilia A’Bell and Ravi Jacob. A’Bell comes from executive sales positions at Oracle and Nokia, while Jacob was previously CVP at Intel.
