Metacloud Raises $10 Million for Private OpenStack Clouds

Metacloud has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Canaan Partners and joined by existing investors Storm Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures. The funding will go towards sustaining the company’s growth, pace of innovation and global expansion.

Enterprises that are looking deeply into OpenStack but feel they might not be quite ready should take note: Metacloud believes it has done all the work for a production-ready private OpenStack cloud, and the company will fully manage it for you. The company provides OpenStack-based private cloud delivered as a service.

"We’ve spent the last two years on product and R&D – getting this software deployment mechanism right hasn’t been trivial," said Metacloud co-founder and CEO Sean Lynch, referring to the company’s unique capability to update its private OpenStack cloud platform for customers remotely. "We’ve invested less on sales and marketing.  Now we want to scale the company."

Background in Large Infrastructure

The founders of Metacloud have a strong pedigree. “We have a tech team with a really deep bench,” said co-founder and CEO Shaun Lynch, who was previously at Ticketmaster’s infrastructure engineering team, ultimately running global operations for a company with $9 billion in annualized revenue. Co-founder and President Steve Curry was a founding member of the Yahoo! Storage operations team responsible for hundreds of petabytes of online storage, backup data and media management.

"One thing that’s different with our team is the big operations background," said Lynch. “It’s really important with a productized offering like this.”

“In addition to a transformative delivery model, Metacloud defines the gold standard of what we look for in a founding team,” said General Partner Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners. “With large scale infrastructure engineering experience gained during their years at Ticketmaster and Yahoo!, Sean Lynch and Steve Curry have the pedigree to deliver on Metacloud’s promise of bringing the ease of the public cloud to the private cloud environment.”

The company charges per socket. In addition to targeting enterprise customers, it says it can help service providers launch solid cloud offerings – in fact, it already has with a few undisclosed customers. The company says the third type of customer it is attracting is “large Amazon EC2 customers that have just grown up,” according to Curry.