DigitalOcean Sharpens Developer Focus with $83 Million Series B Funding Round

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

DigitalOcean is putting rumors around additional funding to rest on Wednesday, announcing the close of an $83 million Series B funding round led by Access Industries, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.

Last week Business Insider reported that DigitalOcean secured $83 million in additional funding, building on a $37.2 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz last March.

With aggressive growth and expansion, DigitalOcean is used by more than 500,000 developers that have deployed more than six million cloud servers using its platform. DigitalOcean has grown significantly since its launch in 2012, becoming the second largest cloud hosting company behind AWS.

In an interview with the WHIR in January,DigitalOcean CEO and co-founder Ben Uretsky explained how its focus on developers gives it an edge over AWS.“Where we saw an opportunity for DigitalOcean was to be the exact opposite of AWS has become. As an individual developer, you don’t have the same resources to figure out the complex ecosystem that AWS provides…not to mention, Amazon wants to lock you into their ecosystem as much as possible, so they brand everything under their own terminology. So, all-in-all, you walk away extremely confused and frustrated. And that’s where we saw the opportunity.”

By targeting developers who need to spin up cloud servers and scale them quickly, DigitalOcean has done well and plans to continue to support its core users by expanding its feature set beyond its virtual cloud service it calls Droplets.

“We are laserfocused on empowering the developer community,” Mitch Wainer, cofounder and CMO at DigitalOcean said in a statement. “This capital infusion enables us to expand our worldclass engineering team so we can continue to offer the best infrastructure experience in the industry.”

Access Industries reiterated DigitalOcean’s commitment to the developer community in its statement announcing the funding.

“Technology represents the foundation on which today’s greatest companies are built,” said Pueo Keffer, head of venture capital at Access Industries. “DigitalOcean is uniquely positioned to grow with the developer community, which creates and maintains this very foundation.”

DigitalOcean has data centers in NYC, San Francisco, Singapore, London and Amsterdam. It opened a data center in Germany in April.

This first ran at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/digitalocean-sharpens-developer-focus-with-83-million-series-b-funding-round