Platform9, the open-source-as-a-service company making hybrid clouds easy, today announced it has raised $22 million in Series C funding led by Canvas Ventures. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) also participated in the round, as did existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures. The funding round, which brings Platform9's total capital raised to date to $36.5 million, allows the company to scale its pioneering cloud delivery model, which makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain hybrid clouds with popular cloud frameworks, such as Kubernetes, OpenStack and Fission. The new capital enables Platform9 to scale its global salesforce, product and marketing teams, as well as boost engineering investments as it expands its innovation agenda to deliver new capabilities for hybrid clouds.

"Enterprises today are racing to adopt the cloud, but struggle with managing numerous infrastructure silos, ranging from legacy virtualized data centers to pockets of public cloud deployments," said Sirish Raghuram, CEO, Platform9. "With our novel SaaS approach to complex cloud frameworks, we enable infrastructure anywhere to be easily managed using industry-leading open-source frameworks such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. Today, Platform9 is enabling DevOps, reducing costs and accelerating cloud transformation for more than 200 clouds worldwide."

Platform9 emerges as a hybrid cloud leader

The financing round caps a year of tremendous growth for Platform9, in which it has emerged as the leader in hybrid cloud management, ahead of established virtualization and cloud megavendors. A few highlights include:

• Customer base growth of 360 percent and revenue growth of 300 percent
• Winning marquee enterprise customers across industries, with 60+ enterprise customers including Cadence Design, Autodesk, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Sony Playstation
• Net revenue retention of 125 percent, with existing customers increasing their annual subscription licenses
• With more than 200 enterprise clouds managed worldwide, Platform9 has emerged as the top enterprise cloud platform in terms of number of clouds managed
• Product breakthroughs including the industry's first Kubernetes-as-a-service solution that manages any infrastructure, Fission, the leading open source serverless framework, and Omni, open-source extensions for OpenStack to manage public clouds
• Partnerships and joint solution validation with leading enterprise vendors, including  NetApp, Nutanix, Juniper, Dell/EMC, HPE and public cloud providers

"Enterprises know they have to move to the cloud sooner or later," said Gary Little, partner at Canvas Ventures. "But getting there is no small feat. Platform9 simplifies the challenge, helping companies migrate to cloud computing more quickly and cost effectively than any other solution. It also helps customers avoid being locked into a single cloud provider. That's something that resonates with chief technology officers across industries."