RALEIGH, NC—Investors seem to like rPath’s focus on selling its Linux-based rBuilder appliance as a quick path to cloud computing environments. The company has raised a $10 million C round led by its existing backers, General Catalyst, North Bridge Venture Partners and Wakefield Group.
The company, founded by former Red Hat employees, raised a $9.1 million second round in January last year and a $6.4 million first round in March 2006.
The company plans to use this new capital to increase its leadership in enabling cloud computing.
Cloud computing is fully enabled by virtualization technology (hypervisors) and virtual appliances.
A virtual appliance is an application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run optimally in any virtualized environment.
In a cloud computing environment, a virtual appliance can be instantly provisioned and decommissioned as needed, without complex configuration of the operating environment.
In a research note called “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at Stake”, Merrill Lynch says cloud computing has the potential to shower billions in revenues on companies that embrace it.
According to the note, the burgeoning technology concept is seen as a $160-billion addressable market opportunity, including $95-billion in business and productivity applications, and another $65-billion in online advertising.
“As the demand for cloud computing continues to explode, rPath is in a unique position to drive adoption as the fastest and most scalable approach for delivering applications to cloud computing environments such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Citrix’s XenServer, and VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure,” said Billy Marshall, rPath founder and CEO.
Since the beginning of 2008, the company says it has seen a surge of interest in its technology resulting in an increase of over 100 percent in new customers, including 3SP, Avinity Systems, CERN, Cynapse, Department of Energy, DigitalStakeout, Firescope, VIP Tone and Webalo.
On the Web: www.rpath.com
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