Category Archives: Ben Uretsky

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.”

Ben Uretsky, Datacentre, DigitalOcean, Frankfurt, Germany, News & Analysis

DigitalOcean drops into Frankfurt

DigitalOcean is among a number of US-based incumbents moving into Germany

DigitalOcean is among a number of US-based incumbents moving into Germany

In a bid to tap further into the European market DigitalOcean has expanded its presence in Germany with a new datacentre in Frankfurt.

The dev-focused cloud provider already has a presence in Amsterdam and last year partnered with Equinix to make its cloud platform available in one of the company’s London-based Tier III datacentres.

“We’re here to give our full support to developers throughout the world by offering a simple, ideal cloud solution and infrastructure experience for hosting applications,” said DigitalOcean co-founder and chief exec Ben Uretsky. “Innovative companies in Germany deserve the best tools possible in order to continue to grow and succeed.”

The company also said it wanted to appeal to local companies with strong data residency requirements, a common theme among cloud providers throwing their weight into the German market.

Germany – particularly Berlin – has a big startup scene, but putting the datacentre in Frankfurt means it can benefit from being close to a number of large fibre interconnections. Other US-based incumbents to move into Frankfurt over the past few months include IBM (which also partners with Equinix) and AWS.

The facility is DigitalOcean’s third datacentre in Europe and tenth globally.