Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system
administrators, today announced the closing of $8.5 million in Series C
financing to further accelerate the company's already strong growth and customer
success. New investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware join 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 a pivotal year for the company, which 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(TM), the powerful yet easy-to-use IT automation solution for system
administrators. In March, the company was chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the
"OnDemand Top 100" winners.
In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its annual user
conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0, the primary driver of business
growth, has opened new markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning,
configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure dramatically
easier for system administrators.
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 Puppet Labs' community grow beyond North America and Europe,
with user groups and meet-ups sprouting worldwide, including in 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, to name a few.
"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," said Luke Kanies,
CEO of Puppet Labs. "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."
"Global companies need efficient solutions to manage their on-premise and
cloud infrastructures," said Karim Faris, partner at Google Ventures. "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."