Mirantis Gets $10M to Ramp Up its OpenStack Play

openstack-cloud

OpenStack specialist Mirantis has received $10 million in funding from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital to accelerate its growth.

To accelerate its growth in the OpenStack market, Mirantis, a large OpenStack systems integrator, today received $10 million in growth capital financing from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital. OpenStack is an open source cloud operating system, originating from a NASA and Rackspace project and evolving to its current foundation-managed status.

Mirantis, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., was previously financed through sales revenues. “We believe that OpenStack is on its way to becoming a universal control plane for the entire application infrastructure fabric,” said Adrian Ionel, president and CEO of Mirantis. “This phenomenon is transforming the industry. To help accelerate this transformation in a meaningful way, we need strong strategic investors like Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and WestSummit Capital. We consciously picked investors who aligned with us on vision and our commitment to accelerate OpenStack adoption around the world.”

Dell and Intel are active participants in the OpenStack community. WestSummit Capital is a China-based global growth stage technology investment firm that invests in industry-leading technology companies with a substantial presence or strategic interest in China.

The  privately-held Mirantis is working to speed adoption of OpenStack clouds by service providers, SaaS vendors and enterprises. Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and executive vice president, was elected to the board of the OpenStack Foundation, which provides leadership to the community and guidance over development efforts.

Production Deployments

Mirantis continues to amass OpenStack experience, helping its customers in more than 30 OpenStack deployment projects in the past 18 months. Mirantis has assisted many early adopters - organizations such as NASA, WebEx, Gap, PayPal, Internap, and AT&T - successfully launch production-grade clouds.

“Mirantis is a true example of the power of OpenStack technology,” said Lisa Lambert, vice president of Intel Capital and managing director of the Software and Services sector. “In just a short amount of time, Mirantis has established itself as a key OpenStack systems integrator by helping numerous early adopters realize the value of the open source cloud movement. Intel Capital looks forward to working with its team as it continues to expand its global footprint.”

That global footprint includes the Asia-Pacific market, an opportunity addressed in today's investment. “We see tremendous demand for OpenStack in the APAC market and China in particular, said Elise Huang, partner at WestSummit Capital. "Beijing generates more traffic to the OpenStack.org Website than any other city in the world today, and China hosts some of the largest cloud deployments in the world. With our investment, we aim to help Mirantis establish a stronghold in the APAC market.”

“OpenStack is a central component of Dell’s cloud strategy and this investment reflects our company’s commitment to open source platforms that give our customers more options and flexibility," said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president of Dell Cloud.. "We recently announced OpenStack as our open source cloud platform of choice for public and private clouds. The partnership with Mirantis demonstrates our commitment to the community and our goal of becoming a leading contributor to OpenStack. Dell continues to make strategic investments that enhance our portfolio and customer value,”

Mirantis has dedicated developers contributing to OpenStack Quantum LBaaS and helps run the Bay Area OpenStack user group in Silicon Valley. The company also offers a training program to expand the pool of skilled engineering talent and expertise in OpenStack.