Opscode Announces $2.5 Million in Series A Round
Draper Fisher Jurvetson Leads Round in Infrastructure Automation Start-up Founded by Former Amazon.com Operations and Cloud Computing Experts.
SEATTLE, Wash – April 24, 2009 – Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, today announced that it has closed its Series A round of $2.5 million led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Opscode's technology enables companies of all sizes to build, scale, and manage world-class, fully automated infrastructures based on community best practices and expertise. The company plans to use the funds to fill several key positions as it prepares to launch its core service later this year.
Opscode has already released "Chef", an open source systems integration framework. Using Chef, software developers and engineers are able to manage large-scale server and application deployments by writing code, rather than running commands by hand. Chef has a rapidly growing community of contributors and early adopters, and is already in production use at companies including Engine Yard, 37Signals, and Wikia.
"Opscode is defining essential automation solutions that companies need to take full advantage of cloud computing and virtualization technologies," said Bill Bryant, Venture Partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Opscode board member. "The founding Opscode team is comprised of experts who have built and operated some of the Web's largest sites and supporting infrastructure services, such as Amazon EC2.
Founding CEO Jesse Robbins is a widely respected expert in Web Infrastructure and Operations. Robbins is co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance and Operations conference and is a regular contributor to the O'Reilly Radar blog. He previously worked at Amazon.com where his title was "Master of Disaster", responsible for ensuring website availability.
Other members of Opscode's executive team include:
- Adam Jacob, Chief Technology Officer, co-founded Opscode and brings over a decade of experience building tools for systems automation and integration.He has held senior technical positions with HJK Solutions (a leading infrastructure automation consultancy), Marchex, and InfoSpace;
- Christopher Brown, Vice President of Engineering, was most recently Director of Engineering for Global Foundation Services at Microsoft.Prior to Microsoft, Chris was the Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2");
- Barry Steinglass, Vice President of Product Development, was the Program Manager for the digital entertainment features of the Xbox 360 at Microsoft; and
- Nathan Haneysmith, Director of Operations, was the former Linux Platform Lead for the Americas at IBM Global Services.
"Opscode's mission is to bring infrastructure automation to the masses. Our team is uniquely experienced, having built and operated some of the biggest websites and services that people use and rely on every day," said Jesse Robbins, co- founder and CEO of Opscode. "With the financial and strategic support of our investors, we are positioned to fulfill that mission."
About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineer's time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle.
Learn more about Opscode
About Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Draper Fisher Jurvetson ("DFJ") backs extraordinary entrepreneurs anywhere who set out to change the world. DFJ achieves its mission through its DFJ Global Network of Partner Funds managing over $6B on four continents. Over the past twenty years, DFJ and its Network have been proud to back over 600 companies across many sectors including such industry changing catalysts as Hotmail (acquired by MSFT), Baidu (BIDU), Skype (acquired by EBAY), United Online (UNTD), Overture (acquired by YHOO), Athenahealth (ATHN), EnerNOC (ENOC), TicketsNow (acquired by TicketMaster), Feedburner (acquired by Google), Interwoven (IWOV), Four11 (acquired by YHOO), Parametric (PMTC), and Digidesign (acquired by AVID).