Eucalyptus Systems Closes $20 Million Investment Round Led by NEA

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creator of the leading open source private cloud software, announced today the completion of a $20 million round of funding led by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from current investors Benchmark Capital and BV Capital. This represents the company’s second round of funding, bringing total capital raised to date to $25.5 million. Eucalyptus also announced that Peter Sonsini, partner at NEA, has joined the Eucalyptus board of directors. The company is using the funding to scale development, marketing and sales of its commercial open source private cloud software to meet increasing demand for more scalable, agile and cost-efficient information technology (IT) systems.

“The market for private and hybrid cloud computing is poised for massive expansion this year, and we are honored that NEA, one of the world’s largest and most respected venture capital firms, along with current investors Benchmark Capital and BV Capital, will finance the next, high growth, phase for Eucalyptus”

“The market for private and hybrid cloud computing is poised for massive expansion this year, and we are honored that NEA, one of the world’s largest and most respected venture capital firms, along with current investors Benchmark Capital and BV Capital, will finance the next, high growth, phase for Eucalyptus,” said Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus Systems CEO. “Cloud computing is catalyzing a shift in IT that is more significant than anything we’ve previously seen, paving the way for a huge worldwide increase in data, IT consumption and Internet usage. Eucalyptus now has the resources to quickly build on our early leadership position, meet overwhelming customer interest, and help drive this expanding industry.”

NEA’s Sonsini commented, “We’ve been studying this market for some time and early on identified infrastructure software for cloud computing as a major new opportunity. With a scalable, standards-compliant and mature solution – as well as unmatched adoption across the globe -- Eucalyptus has emerged as a clear leader in this space. I look forward to collaborating with the Eucalyptus team to build on their success as the market for private and hybrid clouds grows.”

Eucalyptus is infrastructure software that enables organizations to deploy massively scalable private and hybrid cloud computing environments within a secure IT infrastructure. With Eucalyptus, customers can make more efficient use of their computing resources, increase productivity and deploy new applications faster, while protecting sensitive data and reducing capital expenditures. Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. The company recently announced Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) version 2.0, a major upgrade to the fully-supported commercial version of the Eucalyptus software, as well as a new partner program.

About Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.

Eucalyptus Systems develops enterprise-grade technology solutions built on the open source Eucalyptus software for private and hybrid cloud computing. Originally developed as part of an NSF-funded academic research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Eucalyptus is quickly becoming the standard for on-premise cloud computing, delivering the cost efficiencies and scalability of a cloud architecture with the security and control of deploying on an organization’s own IT infrastructure. Eucalyptus is available in two editions: the open source Eucalyptus Community Edition and the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE), commercial, enterprise-grade infrastructure software designed for large scale-deployments. For more information about Eucalyptus, please visit http://www.eucalyptus.com.

About New Enterprise Associates

New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a leading venture capital and growth equity firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With approximately $11 billion in committed capital, NEA invests in information technology, healthcare and energy technology companies at all stages in a company's lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. Since the firm's founding in 1978, NEA's experienced management team has invested in over 650 companies, of which more than 165 have gone public and more than 265 have been acquired. In the U.S., NEA has two offices in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and one in Menlo Park, California. In addition, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd. has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India and New Enterprise Associates (Beijing), Ltd. has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, China.

For additional information, visit www.nea.com.

About Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital, an early-stage technology venture capital firm, was founded in 1995 to help talented entrepreneurs with original ideas build successful technology companies. Benchmark's general partners take a team-oriented, labor-intensive approach to venture investing to deliver a superior level of service to the firm's portfolio companies. Benchmark's portfolio includes high-profile start-ups such as Twitter, Second Life, Yelp, and Zillow, recent exits such as Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, and Tellme, and franchise companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks and Red Hat. The firm manages nearly $2.8 billion in committed venture capital. For more information on Benchmark Capital, visit its website at www.benchmark.com.

About BV Capital

BV Capital is an international Internet-focused early stage venture capital firm. The team has invested in early pioneers such as AOL, shopping.com, gotomypc and eGroups as well as today’s market leaders such as Angie’s List, Eucalyptus, Groupon, Sonos and Yume Networks. Backing Internet entrepreneurs, BV frequently is the first institutional investor in companies creating highly scalable services and significant value propositions for their users. The firm currently invests out of its Fund III that was raised in 2009 and also operates eVenture Fund I, a dedicated European entity that covers investments throughout the whole of Europe, including the emerging markets Russia and the Ukraine.

Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus Systems are pending trademarks in the U.S. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Other product or company names mentioned may be trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.