Enterprise IT might not be the sexiest of technology areas, but it sure can attract truckloads of money.
The latest deal is a $50 million investment in Boston-based Turbonomic, a nine-year-old virtualization and cloud management software maker formerly known as VMTurbo.
General Atlantic led the funding round and was joined by previous Turbonomic investors Bain Capital Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Globespan Capital Partners, and Iconiq Capital. General Atlantic operating partner Gary Reiner, the former General Electric chief information officer, will join Turbonomic’s board.
Turbonomic has raised at least $125 million from investors to date. That includes another $50 million round announced two years ago.
Turbonomic makes software that helps businesses manage the performance of their online applications and the efficiency of their data centers, with the goal of boosting speed and lowering costs. As Xconomy previously reported, the software acts as a sort of autopilot for data centers, creating a kind of marketplace inside the data center to balance out supplies of server space and other resources with demand from applications and virtual machines.
New England’s IT infrastructure sector has been a prime target for investors and acquirers lately. Last week, Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought Westborough, MA-based SimpliVity, a maker of IT software and hardware infrastructure, for $650 million. A week earlier, Needham, MA-based flash storage firm Kaminario pulled in a $75 million funding round. And Natick, MA-based cloud storage company Nasuni nabbed a $25 million investment in December.
Turbonomic employed about 340 people as of May 2015, and at the time, CEO Ben Nye told Xconomy his company had posted three consecutive quarters of positive cash flow.
When General Atlantic began expressing interest in investing, Turbonomic still had much of the previous $50 million round in the bank, executive chairman Bill Veghte told Forbes. The new investment gives Turbonomic more breathing room as it decides whether to focus on profitability or growth, Forbes reported.
Turbonomic was founded in Valhalla, NY, by Shmuel Kliger, a veteran of EMC and IBM. He is now the company’s president.
