Ravello Systems, Inc. today announced that it has closed a third round of funding of $28 million bringing the total capital raised to date to $54 million. The funding round was led by Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, and SanDisk Corporation through its venture arm, SanDisk Ventures. Existing and new investors - Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Vintage Investment Partners also participated in this funding round.

Founded in 2011 by the team that created the KVM hypervisor, Ravello is driving a fundamental shift in economics for enterprises by simplifying access to leading public clouds. Enterprises can now achieve the perfect balance of private and public cloud resources, by running their applications in any cloud, without any migration overhead. By using Ravello, enterprises have reduced time to provision application environments from months to minutes and eliminated capacity constraints forever.

Ravello Systems took its nested virtualization powered cloud service into a successful public beta in February 2013 and launched the product globally in August 2013. Since then Ravello’s technology has been adopted by a wide variety of enterprises ranging from the Fortune 500 to mid-size and smaller companies. Ravello enables enterprises to recreate their data center environments in the public cloud, with the ability to run VMware workloads, Android emulators and even entire OpenStack labs on AWS or Google Cloud. With this new round of funding, Ravello Systems will significantly expand its marketing and sales operations - both within the US as well as internationally.

“There is a clear need in the market to bridge the divide between VMware oriented virtualized data centers and public clouds like AWS and Google - and nested virtualization has clearly emerged as the right technology to achieve this,” said Rami Tamir, CEO and co-founder of Ravello Systems.

“The ability to use leading public clouds seamlessly is increasingly becoming a need for enterprises,” said Mony Hassid, senior director, Qualcomm Ventures. “There is huge complexity in re-creating enterprise application environments in other clouds, and Ravello’s approach breaks down those technical barriers with incredible speed and simplicity.”

“Ravello’s unique solution is empowering enterprises to use the infinite scale and capacity of the public cloud to bring impressive speed to data center applications,” said Rene Hartner, vice president of corporate business development at SanDisk. “Our investment and collaboration with Ravello complements SanDisk’s leadership in data center storage and broadens our on-going commitment to drive the development and adoption of innovative, next-generation technologies that address the most important considerations for the enterprise today and tomorrow.”

“We invest in technology companies that will shape the next decade of computing,” said Shmil Levy, managing partner, Sequoia Capital Israel. “Just like VMware redefined how applications are run in the data center through virtualization, we see Ravello redefining the use of public clouds for enterprise applications.”