OpenStack cloud vendor Mirantis has raised $100 million in a new Series B round of venture funding—bringing the company’s total capitalization to $120 million as it positions itself for an IPO in 2016.
Mirantis raised $20 million in 2013 in two segments of a Series A round: $10 million in January and another $10 million in June of that year.
Lead investors in the latest funding round are Insight Venture Partners and August Capital. Mirantis President and CEO Adrian Ionel told eWEEK that the company’s existing investors—including Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP Ventures—are all still on board as well.
“This new funding will allow us to execute on our vision and to solidify our leadership in the OpenStack space,” Ionel said. “OpenStack is a foundational technology for the world’s infrastructure, and we want to be the leading company.”
Mirantis has been a leading company in the OpenStack space for years already and has consistently been ranked as one of the top five code contributors to the project. OpenStack is a multi-stakeholder open-source cloud platform started by NASA and Rackspace in 2010.
The effort has expanded over the last four years to include the participation of many IT heavyweights, including IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, AT&T and Dell among others. The most recent iteration of the platform, the OpenStack Juno release debuted on Oct. 16, including the new Sahara Big Data processing project, an effort that Mirantis led.
In a 2013 video interview with eWEEK, Ionel detailed how Mirantis was finding the talent needed to build OpenStack cloud platforms for its clients. Mirantis has a mix of services and products for cloud deployment that includes its own subscription-based OpenStack cloud distribution.
While Mirantis is currently a private company and does not publicly disclose its financial results, Ionel emphasized that revenues are growing fast. He said that Mirantis’ 2014 revenues are more than double what they were in 2013, and the company is booking new business at a rate of $1 million dollars every week.
So far this year, Ionel said that Mirantis has won approximately 50 new customers, with the majority of those engaging with Mirantis for OpenStack product subscriptions. As a subscription-based offering, the Mirantis OpenStack distribution also provides the company with a recurring revenue stream as customers renew their subscriptions year after year.
From a competitive standpoint, there are many vendors in the market with OpenStack distributions, including Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, HP and Piston Cloud Computing. Mirantis’ differentiates itself in that it is a pure-play OpenStack vendor that will support and run on multiple flavors of Linux, Ionel said.
“We support the common Linux operating systems, including CentOS, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL],” Ionel said. “We are looking to strengthen our support relationship with Red Hat for RHEL and we have no plans to build out our own Linux operating system.”
With the new funding in hand, the goal for Mirantis is to remain a stable, viable and growing company for the foreseeable future, Ionel said. “We want to be a stand-alone company, and we envision an IPO for the 2016 timeframe,” he said. “We believe by that time, we will have reached the scale, stability and predictability that will make us an attractive candidate for the public markets.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.