CloudBees raises $11.2 million in Series C funding

Company provides cloud services for developers to help accelerate app delivery

CloudBees, a provider of cloud services for developers, has raised an $11.2 million Series C funding round, the company announced on Wednesday.

The round was led by Verizon Ventures, the investment arm of Verizon Communications Inc, and also included existing investors Matrix Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners, as well as new investor Blue Cloud Ventures.

Founded in early 2010, CloudBees is focused on accelerating app delivery for developers by making it so that they no longer have to worry about provisioning, maintaining and administering complex hardware and software infrastructure.

Ultimately, the company's mission is to save developers time in building, and helping enterprises to bring apps to market very quickly, Andrew Lee, VP of business development at CloudBees, told me in an interview.

What the service allows developers to do is run, and build, continuous integration services through Jenkins CI, its open source continuous integration server. Developers can also easily add third party services, such as run time systems.

What separates CloudBees from other similar companies, Lee said, is that it provides an end to end service, which spans the entire app lifecycle delivery process, from building the app to delivering it. 

"Our biggest competition is 'do it yourself,' where people take bits and pieces and try to stitch them together," said Lee. "On the cloud side, no one does entire lifecycle like we do."

The reason for that? Because "it's hard  to build a really rich, vibrant, open source ecosystem," he said.

CloudBees had previous raised two rounds of funding: a $4 million Series A round in November 2010, and a $10.5 million in Series B round in July 2011. This latest round brings its total funding to $25.7 million. 

The company says that it will use the money to fund additional product capabilities, sales expansion and to extend the reach of the CloudBees brand.

Lee pointed out to me, however, that the company is "not tying proceeds to any specific initative," and that it delivers continuous updates.

The company will be expanding its sales team, and its global footprint, he said, and will "follow customers where there is demand."

The company opened an office in Brussels in May of last year, and could also see expansion into South America and Asia.

Mostly, though, he told me that the money will be going toward increasing awareness of the company, and that he hopes that people will become aware of the company through the news of the financing.

"Success for us is removing hurdles for adoption," Lee said, as well as giving developers the freedom to make their apps on their own turns by offering them access to different parts of the components platform at their own convenience. 

"If they want consume things on the premises we provide that. If they want to consume things on the cloud, we provide that too. We're not trying to tell people theres only one way to do things."

(Image source: cloudbees.com)