Next week, the team at DigitalOcean will move into a 30,000-square-foot office, in the same building but twice the size of its current digs, as it ramps up with more funding in hand.
The New York-based company hosts cloud infrastructure, largely used by developers to build websites and apps.
Along with the extra elbow room, the company plans to double its staff of 160 over the next 12 months, says co-founder and chief marketing officer Mitch Wainer. In addition to its headquarters here, DigitalOcean operates data centers around the world.
These growth moves come just after the company raised $83 million this month in a Series B round led by Access Industries, with Andreessen Horowitz participating.
Wainer says DigitalOcean was founded to meet a need among software developers to quickly deploy servers online. “There were hoops to jump through, pricing was difficult to calculate, and the interfaces were clunky,” he says.
Larger cloud providers typically cater to the enterprise market, Wainer says, leaving small developers out in the cold. DigitalOcean focuses on computing processing, he says, which lets the company rapidly provide its services, with plans to offer more networking and storage down the road.
Many companies are starting to provide a variety of cloud services to the growing developer community these days. Atlantic.net, an Orlando, FL-based company, opened a data center near New York this year to serve the area’s developer scene. Big companies such as Oracle naturally offer cloud services for enterprise-level developers, but now IBM is making a push to get smaller developers to use its Bluemix cloud app development platform.
Meanwhile, DigitalOcean, a graduate of the summer 2012 Techstars class in Boulder, CO, is building up its data infrastructure around the world, Wainer says, to further its reach. “Given that 70 percent of our customers are internationally based, there are emerging markets that we’re not currently servicing in terms of physical location,” he says.
Canada, India, and Brazil are under consideration, Wainer says, as potential sites for DigitalOcean data centers.
Along with its internal growth plans, the company wants to see an open, collaborative environment emerge for infrastructure for developers. The concept has been talked about, Wainer says, but has not materialized yet. This would let developers share such things as server configurations or ways they built clusters and software containers, similar to the way coders can work together. “GitHub has done a fantastic job building a community around code collaboration,” Wainer says. “That’s the open source mantra.”
