Gazzang rings up $3.5M Series A for IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company focused on delivering data security to MySQL clients

Cloud infrastructure software company Gazzang announced Monday that it has secured $3.5 million in Series A funding led by Austin Ventures. Additionally, Larry Warnock, who led the acquisition of Phurnace Software by BMC Software earlier this year, has joined Gazzang as CEO.

Based in, you guessed it, Austin, Texas, Austin Ventures focuses on seed tech companies in business and financial services, new media and software. Austin Ventures recently acted as financial advisor in the sale of RetailMeNot.com to WhaleShark.

Gazzang primarily provides data security, which the company says is widely available for large commercial databases like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server but not open-source alternative MySQL.

The company’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) grants clients unlimited encryption of MySQL databases, tables and files, protection against system and local users, and other features under a scalable, pay-as-you-go-per-server subscription licensing program.

“Gazzang is attacking one of the biggest inhibitors to enterprise-wide adoption of the cloud – data security – but we’re not stopping there,” said Larry Warnock, Gazzang’s newly named chief executive. “We plan to leverage our success in data security to become a major player in the delivery of IaaS management platforms for cloud environments. It is still early days in this space, but our initial customer successes prove we’re on the right path toward maximizing this incredible market opportunity.”

Over 60 customers use Gazzang, says the company, including companies and institutions in financial services (VISA, gotoBilling.com), healthcare (Hartford Hospital, Signature Genomic), higher education (Emory University, Vanderbilt) and technology verticals.