Mesosphere, the creators of one of the world’s first datacentre operating systems, yesterday announced having raised $36 million in Series B funding. New investor Khosla Ventures led the round, with additional investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and others.
Headquartered in San Francisco, and with a second office in Hamburg, Germany, Mesosphere is building a datacentre operating system (DCOS) to help enterprises unlock the next generation of scale, efficiency and automation. The Mesosphere DCOS pools datacentre and compute resources, gives IT operators a much simpler administration model, and improves developer speed with more modern abstractions and APIs for writing distributed systems.
After closing a $10.5 million Series A round in June 2014, which was led by Anderseen Horowitz, this Series B round brings Mesosphere’s total funding to approximately $50 million; the company plans to use the funds to accelerate its global growth as it rolls out the world’s first datacentre operating system.
With a DCOS, developers and operators no longer need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines, but can easily build and deploy applications and services that span entire datacentres. This DCOS approach to programmable datacentres has helped drive the success of internet giants like Google and Twitter, as well as the hypergrowth of young companies like Airbnb and Hubspot.
Florian Leibert, the CEO and co-founder of Mesosphere says: “Today’s applications and services have outgrown single servers. The datacentre needs an operating system. The Mesosphere DCOS automates common operations and makes your entire datacentre programmable. We want to give developers the power of the underlying resources without forcing them to worry about the complexity of spanning hundreds or even thousands of machines. We are making modern, distributed systems as easy to build and operate as if they were running on a single machine.”
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, says: “The industry needs a new type of operating system to optimise and automate the complex landscape inherent to the agile IT era: a growing fleet of distributed web, mobile, analytic server applications, operated as application-centric abstractions on a commodity server and storage pools in dedicated datacentres and public clouds.”
“In this environment, existing virtualisation or orchestration software are insufficient to deliver on the end goals: abstract complexity, optimise utilisation, and simplify or eliminate human intervention in the face of dynamic failures, demand surges, constant provisioning and upgrades. Mesosphere has assembled a world-class team to deliver this software foundation that makes it as easy to run massive distributed server applications as it is to run an app on your smartphone or PC.”
By the way: You can find out about other interesting startups from Germany in this list.
