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Funding

VKernel Scores $7 Million Series B Round

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VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual server management and optimization solutions, today announced it has closed a $7 million Series B round of funding. The latest round was led by Longworth Venture Partners and joined by prior investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners. The new funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing, and product development efforts to capitalize on the rapidly growing server virtualization management market.

The VKernel suite of next-generation virtual server management and optimization solutions is designed to solve real world data center challenges that are impacting IT departments. VKernel leverages the virtual appliance format to instantly deploy its products for enhancing performance, lowering operational and capital costs, optimizing virtual environments of all sizes, and delivering instant ROI. Currently, VKernel supports VMware ESX and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XEN, and others. The company’s current products include:

  • Capacity Analyzer — proactively and predicatively monitor shared capacity resources to prevent current and future problems and optimize the environment
  • Chargeback — provide instant cost visibility and implement a chargeback processes
  • Modeler — quickly test and validate additions and changes to see the performance impact on the environment before going live
  • SearchMyVM — free “Google-like” search utility quickly finds information in virtual environments
  • CompareMyVM — a free community website tool allows visitors to exchange and compare virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large
  • SnapshotMyVM — free tool that completely automates the time-consuming process of documenting the virtual data center

Nilanjana Bhowmik, Partner at Longworth Venture Partners, and Doug McNary, the former CEO of Onaro (acquired by NetApp in 2008) and past executive vice president at Motive and Tivoli, have joined the VKernel Board of Directors.

FastScale Lands $5.5 million Series B Financing

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FastScale Technology today announced that it has secured $5.5 million in a Series B funding round led by ATA Ventures and joined by prior investors Leapfrog Ventures, Hunt Ventures as well as a new strategic corporate investor. The company’s last round of financing occurred in late 2006, shortly before the launch of their flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite.

FastScale’s technology enables data centers to respond to constantly changing business requirements, server workloads, and server hardware with a server software platform that dramatically increases agility while significantly reducing day-to-day operating complexity and cost – whether the data center is virtualized, not virtualized or a hybrid of the two. The ground-breaking technology is the only solution on the market to fully automate the process of building, managing and deploying heterogeneous server software environments with compact software environments built on-demand, automatic patch and configuration management, lightweight provisioning in only seconds, and an enterprise-class repository for lifecycle management.

FastScale software environments average 95% smaller than traditional images, dramatically decrease memory requirements, and increase virtual server density by 300% or more. With FastScale’s solution, the entire server infrastructure, both physical and virtual, is a dynamic pool of resources able to adapt to constantly changing demands.

“FastScale’s approach to the growing issue of software complexity is breakthrough technology for data centers,” said Hatch Graham, managing director at ATA Ventures. “The technology provides an elegant way for enterprises to manage the complexity while increasing server consolidation and decreasing cost. We’ve seen what FastScale has done for customers, and it’s impressive. We look forward to working with the FastScale team to help drive the next stage of company growth.”

Reflex Systems Bags $8.5 Million in Series A Funding

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Reflex Systems today announced that it has secured $8.5 million in Series A funding lead by RFA Management Company, an Atlanta based private investment firm.

The deal marks the final step in the reorganization of Reflex Security Inc. by creating a new Georgia limited liability company, Reflex Systems LLC. Reflex Systems is exclusively focused on virtual management and security software solutions. The company’s award winning Reflex VMC (Virtualization Management Center) product provides the industry’s most comprehensive management solution with dynamic policy enforcement across the entire virtual datacenter, whether the virtual resources are hosted locally, remotely, or in a cloud environment.

“This funding is testament to the innovation that our management and security solutions are delivering to the rapidly growing virtualization market,” said Pete Privateer, CEO of Reflex Systems. “Organizations are investing in virtual infrastructure to streamline costs and operations during these extraordinary economic times. Likewise, the demand for tools to automate the management and security of virtual datacenters is a rapidly emerging market creating significant growth opportunities for Reflex.”

Teradici Raises $17 Million Series C Financing Round

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Teradici Corporation today announced completion of a US $17 million series C funding round for its PC-over-IP network-delivered computing technology. With network-delivered computing, users can work at inexpensive computer stations at any site, with all operating systems, applications, and data residing in central datacenters.

Teradici will use the new funds to continue to market its ground-breaking enterprise PC-over-IP technology around the world and to develop a new offering for consumers and small businesses. Customers of the future service would be able to sit at any workspace in the office, remote office, or user’s home, log in to access their system and files from the central datacenter. Customers would have the option of using their own equipment or receiving terminals as part of their contracted service. They receive exceptional graphics, multimedia, audio and USB connectivity without having to purchase, manage or maintain a PC.

Investors in the over-subscribed funding round include TELUS Ventures, the venture arm of TELUS, as well as Alloy Ventures, GrowthWorks Capital, Skypoint Capital, BDC Venture Capital, and Alta Berkeley Venture Partners.

Teradici also announced that Kevin Salvadori, Executive Vice President of Business Transformation & Technology Operations at TELUS, will assume a seat on its board of directors. Mr. Salvadori brings to the board extensive strategic and operational experience in Information Technology systems architecture, application development and maintenance, technology operations, and physical and technology security.

The investment by TELUS supports the organization’s efforts to partner with high-potential companies that offer unique technologies and innovative products that will accelerate growth initiatives within TELUS.

Skytap Taps $7 Million In Series B Financing

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Skytap today announced it completed a $7 million Series B round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s product development, sales and marketing efforts.

Skytap’s rapidly growing list of customers utilize its cloud-based virtual lab solution to augment or replace dynamic, high cost IT environments such as those used for application development and testing, IT prototyping, product demonstrations and technical training. By allowing users to scale resources on-demand and pay only for time and resources utilized, customers can immediately reduce costs, increase productivity and improve responsiveness to business demands.

Since emerging from stealth less than one year ago, Skytap has achieved strong customer traction and third-party recognition for its innovative virtual lab offering.

Hyperformix Snags $3.8 Million More to Spur Growth in Virtualization Capacity Planning

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Hyperformix, provider of solutions for IT capacity and performance, today announced that it has secured a new round of equity and debt funding totaling $3.8 million. The funding will be used to drive accelerated growth and market penetration for its solutions aimed at the virtualization market. New investor LTI joins existing investors M/C Venture Partners and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners for the round.

Hyperformix will use the funds to expand engineering, marketing and sales of its IT capacity and performance solutions for virtualized environments.

The increasing importance of virtualization management in large scale IT shops has revitalized the market for IT capacity planning. According to Peter Klante, Hyperformix President and CEO, this funding will allow Hyperformix to solidify and accelerate its leadership position in this new and exciting market.

Hyperformix software’s advanced techniques produce accurate predictions of performance and capacity of key applications and deliver actionable insights through compelling interactive dashboards. Hyperformix can automatically assess the current health of IT systems and predict near- and long-term capacity and performance issues. Hyperformix solutions can be used in planning phases for IT changes, in test environments and to manage production environments.