CloudBees Closes $10.5M More, Opens Boston Office

Bring on the bees…or is it the B?

CloudBees, a software startup setting up headquarters in Boston, said today it has received $10.5 million in Series B financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Previous investor Matrix Partners, which led the startup’s $4 million A round back in November, also participated in the new financing. CloudBees says the money will be used for product development and to expand marketing and sales.

The startup is developing a software platform to help businesses develop, run, and manage Java-based applications in the Internet cloud. Java is a dominant programming language for big companies and large-scale Web applications, so there seems to be a great opportunity for innovative tech firms to help enterprise customers take advantage of cloud services for their existing software systems.

CloudBees says it has 27 employees and is opening its first office in Boston this week. The office will primarily be headquarters for sales and marketing; the startup says (rather mysteriously) that its engineering team is “mostly located somewhere else on Earth.”

The company started in early 2010 and is led by founder and CEO Sacha Labourey, the former chief technology officer at JBoss, the open source middleware firm. Labourey has roots in Switzerland (Lausanne and Bern), so it’s a good bet that some of the team is based in that part of the world.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.