Category Archives: Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners, hybrid cloud, Norwest Venture Partners, Ravello, Ravello Systems, Sequoia Capital, Venture Funding, Virtualization

Ravello Systems Gets $26 Million for Hybrid Cloud Hypervisor

Ravello Systems today announced that it has closed its second round of funding bringing the total amount of funds raised to $26 million. Ravello is now backed by Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Founded in 2011 by Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider, the founding team behind the now standard KVM hypervisor, Ravello is positioned to change the game in the hybrid cloud market by delivering the industry’s first Cloud Application Hypervisor.

“Enterprises cannot use the public cloud the way that they would like to which is to be able to rent capacity on demand and simply spill-over bursty workloads,” said Tamir, CEO, Ravello Systems. “That’s not possible today because the public cloud environment is completely different from the enterprises’ internal data center. The industry needs a solution to normalize the application environment across the private and public cloud, so that enterprises can truly begin using the public cloud.”

“We have developed a Cloud Application Hypervisor that encapsulates multi-VM applications along with their entire environment including the VMs, networking, storage etc. so that enterprises can run any application in any cloud without making any changes,” said Schnaider, president and Chairman of the Board, Ravello Systems. “Unlike other solutions in the market that adopt a management only approach, Ravello’s Cloud Application Hypervisor normalizes the application environment so that it can run on the private or public cloud.”

Bessemer Venture Partners, ClearSlide, Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, Venture Funding

ClearSlide Get $28 Million for Cloud Sales Platform

ClearSlide today announced that it has raised $28 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners and Felicis Ventures. Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and John M. Jack, former Chief Executive Officer and President of Fortify Software, have joined ClearSlide’s board of directors.

ClearSlide transforms enterprise sales teams by giving them a single, modern, cloud-based platform on which to communicate with their customers and prospects, whether in-person, over the phone, or via email. Companies use ClearSlide’s analytics to keep their sales teams on message, identify and standardize best practices, and optimize collateral. For sales reps, ClearSlide removes technology friction, encourages teamwork, and highlights customer interest. ClearSlide is 100% focused on providing a broad, integrated product platform that helps enterprise sales teams drive more revenue.

“At BVP, we’ve been fortunate to work with and help nurture some of the largest businesses in the SaaS industry, which has given us strong insight into the key growth drivers and metrics of leading cloud companies,” said Byron Deeter. “I was really impressed by ClearSlide’s team, as well as their operating metrics and rate of market adoption. There is extremely strong customer demand for their offering and we’re thrilled to work closely with ClearSlide in their next stage of hyper growth.”

ClearSlide will use the new funding to rapidly expand the team, invest in new products and technologies, open new offices, and expand marketing. The company has quickly grown to more than 100 employees with plans to more than double headcount in San Francisco and New York.

“We see a huge opportunity before us. I’m excited that our latest round of funding gives us the resources to expand even faster,” said Al Lieb, CEO and co-founder of ClearSlide. “I’m truly proud of what our team has built to date, honored by the passion and loyalty from our customers, and look forward to the size and scope of what we will build in the coming year.”

ClearSlide’s customer base is expanding rapidly and includes companies from a wide range of verticals, including media, technology, business and financial services. Industry-leading companies such as CareerBuilder, Expedia, Gannett, Rackspace, Shazam and The Weather Channel rely on ClearSlide daily for customer communications across their sales team.

“We ran a detailed study on the impact of using ClearSlide within our sales team,” said Andrew Garcia, Media Sales & Marketing Manager at Wayfair. “In Q2, we saw a 60% higher close rate for the companies we pitched using ClearSlide, compared to our traditional average. We also clearly saw that the reps that used ClearSlide the most also closed the most business.”

More information on the ClearSlide platform and innovative new product features that are helping sales professionals win more deals can be found at: http://clearslide.com/public/content/company/blog