With the $8.5 million investment in Series C financing, Puppet Labs has now raised a total of $15.75 million.
Cisco Systems, Google Ventures and VMware were among the companies
that have invested $8.5 million in the latest round of funding
for Puppet Labs, which makes IT automation software for
system administrators.
Puppet Labs on Nov. 29 announced the closing of the Series C
financing, with Cisco, Google and VMware joining existing
investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures and Radar
Partners. With the $8.5 million investment, Puppet Labs has now raised
a total of $15.75 million.
The funding caps off what the company called a "pivotal year"-Puppet
Labs now boasts more than 250 customers, including Zynga, Twitter,
NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com,
Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University. In
January, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open-source roots and
announced Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet, an
IT automation solution for system administrators.
In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its
annual user conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0, which has
been the key driver in the company's growth, has opened new
markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning, configuring and
managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure easier for system
administrators.
Whether their organizations are using Amazon EC2 instances, physical
servers or private cloud VMware virtual machines, system administrators
can use Puppet Enterprise 2.0 to create new infrastructure and to start
managing it. The platform builds on Puppet's model-driven approach,
which allows systems administrators to specify their infrastructure by
resource and clone these resources across nodes.
"Global companies need efficient solutions to manage their
on-premise and cloud infrastructures," Karim Faris, a partner at
Google Ventures, said in a statement. "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."
In October, The Wall Street Journal noted that the demand for
IT professionals with "Puppet skills" had tripled over the previous 12
months. This year has also seen the company's community grow beyond
North America and Europe, with user groups and meet-ups sprouting in
such places as China, India and Japan. Puppet Labs has also
continued to grow its partner ecosystem such that it now offers
integrations with VMware, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, OpenStack,
Eucalyptus, RightScale, Zenoss, and others.
"The participation of these new investors in this latest round
reinforces our lead in providing powerful IT automation tools for
system administrators, whether deploying applications on-premise or in
the cloud," Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies said in a statement. "Together,
we are well-positioned to enable IT organizations to fully capitalize
on the tectonic shifts of virtualization and cloud computing in their
delivery of business results."
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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