Category Archives: Andreessen Horowitz

Access Industries, Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Uretsky, DigitalOcean, Funding, IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, Mitch Wainer, News & Analysis

Dev-focused DigitalOcean raises $83m from Access Industries, Andreessen Horowitz

DigitalOcean raised $83m this week, which it will use to add features to its IaaS platform

DigitalOcean raised $83m this week, which it will use to add features to its IaaS platform

DigitalOcean this week announced it has raised $83m in a series B funding round the cloud provider said would help it ramp up global expansion and portfolio development.

The round was led by Access Industries with participation from seasoned tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz.

DigitalOcean offers infrastructure as a service in a variety of Linux flavours and and aims its services primarily at developers, though the company said the latest round of funding, which brings the total amount it has secured since its founding in 2012 to $173m, will be used to aggressively expand its feature set.

“We are laser­-focused on empowering the developer community,” said Mitch Wainer, co-founder and chief marketing officer at DigitalOcean. “This capital infusion enables us to expand our world­-class engineering team so we can continue to offer the best infrastructure experience in the industry.”

Although the company is fairly young, and with just ten datacentres globally it claims to serve roughly 500,000 (individual) developers deploying cloud services on its IaaS platform, a respectable size by any measure. It also recently added another European datacentre in Frankfurt back in April, the company’s third on the continent.

But with bare bones IaaS competition getting more intense it will be interesting to see how DigitalOcean evolves; given its emphasis on developers it is possible the company’s platform could evolve into something more PaaS-like.

“We began with a vision to simplify infrastructure that will change how millions of developers build, deploy and scale web applications,” said Ben Uretsky, chief exec and co-­founder of DigitalOcean. “Our investors share our vision, and they’ll be essential partners in our continued growth.”

Andreessen Horowitz, Business Intelligence, General Catalyst Partners, GoodData, Tenaya Capital, Venture Funding, Windcrest Partners

GoodData Gets $25 Million for Business Intelligence Tools

Image representing GoodData as depicted in Cru...

GoodData announced today that it has closed $25 million in Series C funding led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners. The company has raised $53.5 million in total to date.

Brian Paul, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital will join the board of directors. Other existing board members include John O’Farrell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Larry Bohn, Managing Director of General Catalyst Partners; James Gellert, Partner at Windcrest Partners, Dave Girouard, former General Manager of Google Enterprise, and Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData.

Since the company was founded, more than 6,000 customers have adopted GoodData to monetize their data. In 2011, the company posted 600 percent bookings growth and more than doubled employees and customers, making GoodData one of the fastest growing companies in the space.

GoodData will use the new funding to continue to invest in technology innovation as well as build sales and marketing programs to raise awareness and accelerate adoption of its disruptive, cloud-based platform.

“It’s time to pull the plug on the old business intelligence model — it’s clear that it is obsolete,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData. “We are pioneering a new approach to business intelligence that will monetize and bring big data to life.”


Andreessen Horowitz, Bitcasa, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, First Round Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, Storage, Venture Funding

Bitcasa Gets $7 Million for “Infinite” Cloud Storage

Bitcasa, the cloud storage company that integrates infinite storage, sync, backup and share into desktops and across devices, announced today that it has raised $7 million in its Series A funding round, bringing the total funding to $9 million. Pelion Venture Partners, an existing investor, and Horizons Ventures, a new investor, led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures participating. Funds will be used to further accelerate the company’s impressive growth, shorten the time-to-market for upcoming storage and data management offerings, and expand sales and marketing. The company’s service offering is also now officially in open beta, and users can sign up at http://www.bitcasa.com.

In the past few months, Bitcasa users in 120 countries saved more than 4 petabytes of data and uploaded more than 1 billion files to Bitcasa. The service uses client-side encryption, compression, and deduplication technologies to seamlessly integrate infinite storage into all of the devices. Users can now store, sync, backup and send infinite amounts of data without having to worry about management and capacity constraints. During the beta program, they can take advantage of the service for free; after beta, they can continue the access to infinite storage for only $10 a month.

“As the seed investor, we have been impressed with Bitcasa’s efforts to solve the storage challenges that consumers and small and medium businesses face,” said Carl Ledbetter, managing director at Pelion Venture Partners and a Bitcasa board member. “Bitcasa’s infinite storage solution solves space, management, and security challenges for today’s users and has been well-received by the tens of thousands who have tried the service during its beta period. Bitcasa’s solution goes far beyond services that provide only backup, synchronization, or large file sharing or movement; Bitcasa is the first and only service that provides unlimited storage of all of a user’s files in the cloud, making the cloud-based virtual desktop a reality. This is the way we will all connect to our online, tablet, mobile, and PC-based environments in the near future, and Bitcasa is the defining step.”

“I am glad to see the continued commitment of our initial investors, as well as the involvement of our new investors,” said Tony Gauda, co-founder and CEO of Bitcasa. “This funding round shows that our investors recognize the potential that we have in this market and have been pleased with our progress. It is exciting to see the users’ increased adoption of our infinite storage solution that helps them store and share more data than they could have ever imagined. We are working on more amazing features and are currently looking to bring on great talent to join our team.”