Puppet Labs Raises $8.5 Million from Investors

Puppet Labs – which recently made a push in cloud management – has raised $8.5 million from investors in its latest funding round.

Taking part in the Series C round were VMware, Google (News - Alert) and Cisco. Also participating are current investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures and Radar Partners. Another investor is Gene Kim, who is the founder of Tripwire (News - Alert).

“I’m thrilled,” Luke Kanies, the CEO and founder of Puppet Labs said in a blog post. “It’s an exciting milestone for our company.”

“Working together, we’ll be able to build software that allows system administrators to deliver business-critical results with both higher quality and greater agility,” Kanies added.

The company says it will use the money to design products that allow “users to move faster, with more information, and across a wider selection of technologies than ever before … as it’s clear is necessary to take full advantage of the disruptions of virtualization and cloud computing.”

The money will also let the company invest in its “community and platform,” according to the blog post.

"As trends go, while at times it's difficult to separate reality from hype, it's clear that virtualization and cloud computing are disrupting our industry at every layer in the stack," Kanies said in the blog post. "Amidst this chaos, VMware has carved-out impressive leadership in virtualization and private cloud computing. And Google, in order to scale their businesses to meet exponentially growing demand, pioneered many of the concepts of cloud computing that are just now being commercialized for the broader market. Such partners provide us with an incredibly powerful crystal ball into the dynamics and impact of these trends."

Puppet Labs builds tools for system administrators. The company recently released Puppet Enterprise – its first commercial product, which added cloud provisioning, change monitoring and management orchestration from a single console, the company said.

Puppet Enterprise 2.0 also lets users “provision VMware and Amazon … instances to migrate apps across public and private clouds and also configure and manage those instances. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 is the second iteration of Puppet's first commercial product, which it launched in January,” says CRN.

And Puppet Enterprise 2.0 lets systems administrators “provision infrastructure in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or in their own data centers, comprehensively visualize changes in their infrastructure, and orchestrate management changes across clusters of nodes” – within a graphical interface, reports TMCnet.

In a related matter, CRN reports that the $8.5 million brings the cumulative investment total raised by Puppet Labs to $15.75 million.