Ravello Raises $28M for Cloud Mobility Tech

Ravello Systems, a Silicon Valley startup with technology that gives applications cloud mobility, announced it has closed a $28 million funding round, led by Qualcomm and SanDisk. This brings the total funds raised to date to $54 million.

Founded by the team that created the KVM hypervisor, Ravello offers what it calls a nested virtualization-powered cloud service, enabling businesses to re-create their data centers in the public cloud. The company also announced major release of its HVX-nested hypervisor, which it says wraps complex application environments in self-contained capsules that can run on any cloud.

The almost-two-year-old company launched its beta product in 2013, alongside an initial $26 million funding round from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners, all of whom also participated in this round.

As an enabler of cloud mobility, the company says it works to bridge the divide between public cloud and enterprise VMware-virtualized data centers. Ravello plans significant expansion of its marketing and sales operations around the world with the new funding.

Delivering on the promise of encapsulating an entire application stack is of course familiar in recent times, with the container movement and success of Docker. Taking it another step forward, Ravello says it enables VMware workloads, Android emulators, and entire OpenStack labs on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.

"The ability to use leading public clouds seamlessly is increasingly becoming a need for enterprises," Mony Hassid, senior director, Qualcomm Ventures, said in a statement. "There is huge complexity in re-creating enterprise application environments in other clouds, and Ravello’s approach breaks down those technical barriers with incredible speed and simplicity."

Ravello says the new release of HVX features support for virtualization extensions, such as Intel VT and AMD SVM, and running third-party hypervisors, such as KVM on top of AWS or Google's cloud. New networking functionality in the HVX release gives full support for VLANs and mirror ports on top of AWS and Google cloud. Finally, Ravello has done a complete refresh of the user interface and included a unified repository of all compute, storage, and networking resources.