OpenStack Private Cloud Provider Blue Box Raises $4M

Seattle-based on-demand private cloud provider Blue Box has closed a Series B financing round, adding another $4 million to the previously announced $10 million.

The company announced general availability of its hosted OpenStack private cloud services in May. It’s an alternative to building and managing your own OpenStack cloud. Blue Box delivers its services from data centers in Seattle, Ashburn, Virginia, and Zurich.

The funding will go toward expanding engineering, sales, marketing, and business development teams. The company also plans to expand its channel program, which will allow other service providers to launch OpenStack-based cloud services for their customers.

“The combination of our unique IP and true operating experience makes it possible for Blue Box to deliver consistent, reliable, efficient, and agile private cloud infrastructure as a service directly and through channel partners, and it’s that model we’re moving to implement in 2015 with our partners,” Blue Box CEO Matthew Schiltz said in a statement.

The company’s second strategic investor that joined the round is a large integrated telecommunications provider, which plans to deliver Blue Box Cloud services to its customers. The company did not disclose the investor's name.

Additional investors in the round include Voyager Capital and Founders Collective, as well as the Blue Box executive team.

Blue Box raised a $4.3 million Series A led by Voyager Capital in 2012.

Investment continues to flood into the OpenStack ecosystem, as several providers look to put their unique spin and talents atop of the popular open source cloud architecture. One example is CloudScaling, which has an OpenStack-powered cloud offering focusing on turnkey solutions. Another managed OpenStack private cloud provider Metacloud was acquired by Cisco in September.

“VC investment in the OpenStack ecosystem has been vibrant for some time now,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, in a release. “What’s new is an emerging interest among service providers and other strategic investors who back companies with products built on OpenStack, with an eye toward reselling OpenStack-powered services to their existing customer bases. It’s a new milestone in the evolution and maturation of our platform.”