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Mirantis Raises Another $100 Million, This Time from Intel

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Aug 25, 2015

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How much money does a privately-held OpenStack services vendor need? That’s a question Mirantis is figuring out as it continues to raise large sums of money to fuel its efforts and help capitalize on the market opportunity.

Mirantis announced a new $100 million round of funding on August 24 led by Intel Capital, as well as new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital. Mirantis president and co-founder, Alex Freedland, told ServerWatch that technically this is a Series B2 round.

The new Series B2 round follows the initial B round that Mirantis first announced in October 2014. Mirantis raised $20 million in 2013 in two segments of a Series A round: $10 million in January and another $10 million in June of that year.

“Mirantis has raised around $200M in equity,” Freedland said. “We are not disclosing the precise sum.”

Freedland added the new B2 round includes a combination of equity and spending.

“The spending component is a technology collaboration between Intel and Mirantis governed by a co-development agreement,” Freedland said. “The companies will commit engineering resources to make OpenStack a first class citizen when CIOs are making a decision of what technology will drive their software-defined cloud infrastructures. “

Mirantis claimed in 2014 that it was booking new business at a rate of $1 million dollars every week. With the new Series B2 funding, Freedland said Mirantis will be chasing the trillion dollar question that the technology industry faces: where will the enterprise workloads run and who will own the cloud?

“Intel and Mirantis believe that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software,” Freedland said. “It unleashes innovation, velocity, diversity, and competition; it minimizes lock-in; and it brings better value to customers by increasing competition between on-premises and public cloud technologies. “

Where Will the Funds Be Going?

Freedland said the investment lets Mirantis speed up innovation in the OpenStack community even more. The funds will go toward engineering and will focus on the enterprise-readiness features in OpenStack, including areas like networking, storage and big data.

“We will also focus on making OpenStack work at scale and ensuring there are delivery tools to consume it,” Freedland said.

While Intel is now a large strategic investor in Mirantis, that doesn’t preclude Mirantis from working with other silicon vendors including AMD, IBM Power and ARM.

“One of the top reasons enterprises choose OpenStack is for its diverse community and for its pluggability across vendors,” Freedland said. “We plan to continue our open partnership model across the board, which includes silicon vendors.”

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