Ignition Partners

Security Virtualization Startup Raises $9.2 Million Series A

June 24, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Bromium, emerging from stealth mode to develop technology in the areas of virtualization and security, has announced it has closed a $9.2 million series A round of funding with Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Founded by Gaurav Banga, Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, Bromium is focused on the delivery of infrastructure solutions that permit enterprises to safely embrace two major trends in IT: consumerization and cloud computing.

The Bromium Board of Directors is drawn from business leaders and technologists with extensive experience in infrastructure software, virtualization and security: Peter Levine, venture partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition Ventures; and George Kurtz, worldwide CTO and executive vice president at McAfee. Bromium has already attracted top engineering talent from Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, McAfee and NVIDIA.

Prior to founding Bromium, CEO Gaurav Banga was CTO and SVP, Engineering at Phoenix Technologies. Simon Crosby (co-founder and CTO) joins Bromium from Citrix, where he was CTO of the Data Center & Cloud Division. He joined Citrix through the acquisition of XenSource in 2007, which he also co-founded and led as CTO.

Ian Pratt (co-founder and SVP Products) is the chairman of Xen.org and was co-founder of XenSource. Prior to Bromium, he served as vice president of advanced products in the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

Cloud-based Systems Management Company ScaleXtreme Raises $11M

June 21, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

ScaleXtreme, a cloud-based systems management company, today announced it has closed an $11 million Series B led by Ignition Partners with participation from previous investor, Accel Partners.

The new financing will be used to accelerate the rollout of additional product capabilities, and expand marketing and sales for ScaleXtreme’s new way of managing hybrid clouds.

ScaleXtreme’s product transforms the way IT admins manage their Amazon EC2, VMware virtual machine and physical server deployments. ScaleXtreme was founded by a team with deep expertise in enterprise software and systems management, including Bladelogic and VMware.

“There is a dramatic shift going on in the computing industry with the advent of virtualization and public cloud computing – and with this, there is a significant opportunity for some company to transform the management of the new computing landscape,” said Mulchandani, CEO of ScaleXtreme.

Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition, will join the board that includes Ping Li from Accel and Nand Mulchandani and Balaji Srinivasa from ScaleXtreme.

(Via TechCrunch)

Skytap Taps $7 Million In Series B Financing

March 18, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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.

InstallFree Secures $8.5 Million in VC Funding

August 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

InstallFree, a provider of Dynamic Desktop Computing, today announced (PDF) it has received $8.5 Million in financing to drive the expansion of its product development and go-to-market teams. This round of financing was led by venture capital firms Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners. Richard Fade and John Connors of Ignition Partners and Peter van Oppen and Chuck Stonecipher of Trilogy Equity Partners will join InstallFree’s Board of Directors. The round follows a first round of financing of $1.7 Million secured in November 2007.

InstallFree launched its first product in April 2008. The company’s solutions improve IT operational efficiency and increase end-user productivity by eliminating the need to install software applications thus overcoming application conflicts and enabling the delivery of incremental changes on-the-fly and on-demand. All of this occurs without changing the organization’s existing infrastructure. With InstallFree, end-users can access their complete set of personal applications from any computer and work anywhere without limitations, while enjoying local application processing and offline availability—without undermining the IT department’s centralized management capabilities.

Dynamic Desktop Computing is a platform that enables organizations to centrally deploy and manage Windows client applications to end-users in a stateless, flexible and cost-efficient manner across a variety of end-user scenarios such as the office, home or on the road. InstallFree presents an elegant solution, changing application and desktop virtualization from a one-off solution to a standard method of deploying and managing software applications throughout a company’s entire corporate infrastructure.

InstallFree