Author: Kyle Wiggers @kyle_l_wiggers  TechCrunch

Platform9, which bills itself as an “open distributed cloud company,” today announced that it closed a $26 million funding round led by Celesta Capital with participation from Cota Capital, NGP Capital and other investors. CEO Bhaskar Gorti said that the new cash will be used to drive Platform9’s go-to-market strategy and product research and development, particularly as the company seeks out larger-scale enterprise deployments.

Platform9 was founded by Sirish Raghuram, Madhura Maskasky, Bich Le and Roopak Parikh, who worked together to create several virtualization products in the early aughts. Their hypothesis was that open source ecosystems would grow to offer a broad range of offerings in the cloud but that enterprises needed a simpler way to operationalize them. A recent McKinsey report suggests that fewer than 25% of cloud initiatives meet their time-to-market and cost goals.

Platform9 ostensibly delivers this by allowing developers to run Kubernetes — the open source platform for managing self-contained workloads — and other cloud-native technologies on distributed cloud services. It works with existing infrastructure to create cloud-native clusters that come with monitoring features and integrate with third-party tools. Here, “cluster” refers to a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run apps “containerized” with the dependencies and services necessary to run them.

Platform9 offers a number of tools to help manage clusters running in the cloud, whether in the public cloud or on premises. Image Credits: Platform9

Using Platform9, developers can remotely install, operate and maintain clusters via a software-as-a-service management plane. Its capabilities include automated security patching, on-demand upgrades, and “self-healing” clusters, as well as multiversion support and audit logging.

Platform9’s service powers 40,000 nodes across private, public and edge clouds, according to Gorti.

“To create a more open cloud experience, Platform9’s cofounders studied emerging open-source work in the infrastructure space, including Apache CloudStack, OpenStack, LXD, and Kubernetes,” Gorti continued. “They were inspired by the agility developers gained using public clouds, but wanted to challenge the assumption that this could only be achieved by limiting enterprises to a walled garden.”

While Gorti declined to discuss revenue, he said that Platform9 — whose funding to date stands at $100 million — currently has over 60 enterprise customers and 120 employees. The business grew 100% from 2021 to 2022 while net revenue retention, which calculates total revenue minus revenue churn (e.g., contract expirations, cancellations, and downgrades), increased 132%.