Puppet secures $42 million in series F funding to help with automation push

Software delivery and automation provider Puppet has raised $42 million (£31.9m) in series F funding to complement its recent expansion.

The round, which was led by Cisco Investments, alongside EDBI, Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures and VMware, comes only a few weeks after Puppet announced the acquisition of Reflect, a company which provides data visualisation as a service. Total funding for the company now stands at $149.5 million across seven rounds in total.

Puppet certainly has reasons to be bullish about its scope. According to the company’s 2017 DevOps report, 66% of DevOps engineers and 69% of software engineers polled in the US get paid more than $100,000 per year, with the overarching message being that enterprises are getting to grips with new ways of delivering IT services and software.

It is evidently this route of giving users insights to deliver better services – whether it’s through data visualisation, as in the Reflect acquisition, or otherwise – driving Puppet’s recent gains. The company cited Gartner figures from earlier this year which argue that by 2020, 90% of the top 100 global companies will be using DevOps practices to significantly cut operational inefficiencies.

“Our rapid growth and international expansion is a testament to the rising demand for DevOps transformation, software automation and the pressing need for enterprises to navigate the new world of software delivery,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO of Puppet. “That’s why we’ve been so focused on expanding our product portfolio – to empower customers to discover, deliver and operate software across their cloud and containerised environments.”

The company opened five new offices over the past year, in Seattle, Singapore, Sydney, Timisoara and Tokyo. When this publication focused on Puppet in May last year, the first three were in the pipeline, with the company saying there was ‘global momentum’ in its results.