Rich Levandov, Avalon’s managing member and also an early investor in Zynga, has invested in four other notable cloud companies: Backupify, Cloudkick, Cloudant and TwinStrata. He will be joining Standing Cloud’s board of directors.
Avalon is a San Diego, Calif.-based venture capital fund focused on seed and early-stage life sciences and IT companies, primarily in California and the Northeast. Boulder, Colo.-based Foundry Group, which invests in early-stage IT companies all through North America, last led Standing Cloud’s $2 million Series A round.
Standing Cloud, also based in Boulder, hosts cloud computing applications like Drupal and WordPress, helping clients upgrade, backup and generally monitor the status of installed applications. The company targets small- and medium-sized business (SMB) users who deploy open-source applications themselves as well as solution providers or IT professionals.
The new funds will be used for further marketing and developing the company’s offerings, with a focus on the Standing Cloud Application Network, sort of app store for open-source applications. Standing Cloud hopes the network will help unite end users with applications and plug-ins, cloud infrastructure providers and solution providers.
JumpBox is a competing company focusing on open-sourec application management.