Mesosphere, which helps businesses deploy advanced apps and automate operations within their IT infrastructure, announced Monday that it has raised $125 million in a Series D funding round.
San Francisco-based Mesosphere aims to make it easier even for non-tech companies, such as retailers and cruise ship lines, to develop new digital features, such as streaming video and audience analytics, through the use of machine learning tools and other cutting-edge software. The company creates unified controls for their customers’ various computing resources, which can include traditional data centers, Web-based computing and data storage platforms, and distributed edge computing nodes.
Founded in 2013, Mesosphere is a rival of Raleigh, NC-based Red Hat (NYSE: [[ticker:RHT]]) and San Francisco-based Pivotal Software (NYSE: [[ticker:PVTL]]), which raised $555 million in its initial public offering April 20.
Mesosphere’s substantial Series D fundraising round was co-led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. Joining in the round were ZWC Ventures, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), and Disruptive Technology Advisers (DTA), along with earlier investors Andreessen Horowitz, Two Sigma Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The new money brings Mesosphere’s fundraising total to more than $250 million, and will fund the company’s global expansion into territories including the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East.
“We will use the funds to accelerate growth by increasing our engineering and sales footprint, and make strategic expansions into global markets, like China,” Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert said in an e-mail exchange with Xconomy.
Leibert said the company is focused on growth at this point, but “profitability is on our near-term roadmap.” He said the company has come close to tripling its revenue each year since it was founded. “Last November we revealed the company was on a more than $50 million run rate,” Leibert said.
The company says it serves 125 companies, including 30 percent of the Fortune 50. Mesosphere names retailer Tommy Hilfiger, cruise line Royal Caribbean, telecommmunications company Deutsche Telekom, and NBCUniversal as customers. Most of Mesosphere’s 300 employees work in San Francisco, but the company has offices in Hamburg, New York, London, and Beijing.
Will Mesosphere make acquisitions, or follow rival Pivotal and float an IPO any time soon? “While we have no immediate plans for an acquisition or an IPO, we would not rule it out as a potential future option,” Leibert told Xconomy.
Photo credit: Cumulonimbus cloud by Bernard DUPONT via Flickr used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.
