Mirantis Raises $100 Million Series B, Challenging Incumbents as the Pure-Play OpenStack Leader

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Oct. 21, 2014 – Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, today announced $100 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners. The financing is the largest Series B open source investment in history, and one of the largest Series B investments in B2B software, validating Mirantis as the breakaway independent pure-play OpenStack vendor. Insight Venture Partners was joined by August Capital, as well as existing investors Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, Ericsson, and Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures). Alex Crisses, managing director at Insight Venture Partners, will join the Mirantis board of directors.

“OpenStack adoption is accelerating worldwide, driven by the need for low cost, scalable cloud infrastructure. 451 Research estimates a market size of $3.3 billion by 2018,” said Alex Crisses. “Mirantis delivers on OpenStack’s promise of cloud computing at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional IT vendors, and without the compromise of vendor lock-in. Their customer traction has been phenomenal.”

“Mirantis is already leading the OpenStack ecosystem. We are committed to helping it become the principal cloud vendor,” said Vivek Mehra, general partner at August Capital, whose partners have helped grow Splunk, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Seagate, Skype, and Tegile Systems into dominant technology players. “Its unique pure-play approach will trump the lock-in of traditional IT vendors.”

Mirantis has helped more than 130 customers implement OpenStack – more than any other vendor –  including Comcast, DirectTV, Ericsson, Expedia, NASA, NTT Docomo, PayPal, Symantec, Samsung, WebEx and Workday.  Among these is the largest OpenStack deal on record: a five-year software licensing agreement with Ericsson. Mirantis is also the largest provider of OpenStack products and services for the telecommunications industry, serving Huawei, NTT Docomo, Orange, Pacnet, Tata Communications, and others.

“Our mission is to move companies from an expensive, lock-in infrastructure to an open cloud that empowers developers and end-users at a fraction of the cost. Customers are seeing the value; we’ve gone from signing about $1 million in new business every month to $1 million every week,” said Mirantis President and CEO, Adrian Ionel. “People choose us because we have the best software and expertise for OpenStack, foster an open partner ecosystem, and are a major upstream contributor, influencing the technology’s direction.”

“Mirantis OpenStack is the only truly hardened and commercially-supported OpenStack distribution today that you can just download from the website, install using an intuitive GUI driven process and be up and running in no time,” said Nicholas Summers, Cloud Architect at Home Depot, a Mirantis customer. “With everyone else, you either get raw upstream code or need to engage in an elaborate sales discussion before even getting your hands on the commercial version.”

Mirantis will use the funds to double its engineering investments. It will focus on development of its zero lock-in OpenStack software, including its downloadable distribution, Mirantis OpenStack, and its on-demand, hosted option, Mirantis OpenStack Express. Mirantis is currently the No. 3 contributor to OpenStack and will continue contributing to the community, with particular focus on enterprise-grade reliability and ease-of-use. The funds will also be used to accelerate international expansion in Europe and Asia-Pacific, deepen its bench of support engineers, and grow its open partner ecosystem.

“Driving the accessibility of software defined infrastructure and cloud computing to data centers around the world is an imperative for Intel,” said Jason Waxman, vice president of Intel’s Data Center Group and general manager of Intel’s Cloud Platforms Group. “Mirantis plays a key role in the OpenStack movement, and our investment is designed to accelerate industry adoption of cost-effective workload orchestration solutions.”