Eucalyptus Systems raises $5.5 million

UC Santa Barbara research project launches private company with VC funding

Eucalyptus Systems, a company which develops an open-source private cloud computing platform, has closed $5.5 million in Series A funding, led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital participating. 

The Santa Barbara, Ca., based company was started as a research project at UC Santa Barbara, led by Dr. Rich Wolski in 2007.  They built an open source cloud computing platform which enabled companies to build their own private clouds aside from having to use services like Amazon Web Services or Google.   But at the same time, Eucalyptus allows these private clouds to connect to the public ones named above.   

Since the launch of Eucalyptus, the open-source platform has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries.  Also, the software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.  Eucalyptus will be shipped with every copy of Ubunto made available today.

With the transition from University project to an actual company, Eucalyptus Systems aims to support its open source cloud computing platform and deliver on premise services for enterprise deployments.  Dr. Wolski, who is now CTO of the company said in a statement, “Eucalyptus Systems will ensure the viability and growth of Eucalyptus well beyond its life as a university research project, while also extending the technology to meet the needs of organizations that require high scalability, reliability, and enterprise-grade support.”

What Eucalypus has to offer that’s different from other companies is its ‘hybrid’ clouds which use public and private resources to get unique benefits from each.  It allows for more features like end-user customization, self-service provisioning and in the end, claims to be, ‘less expensive.’