I have some exciting news to share today. Bright has just closed a new financing round, raising $14.5 million of capital from a syndicate of prestigious venture capital firms.
This Series B round was co-led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and DFJ Esprit, with participation from Prime Ventures and existing shareholder ING Corporate Investments. They share our long term vision and will support us in building an enduring business that will thrive for decades to come.
DFJ Partner Bill Bryant, Prime Ventures Partner Alexander Ribbink, and DFJ Esprit Partner Richard Marsh will be joining our board of directors. New board member for ING will be Rob Bening, CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) for ING Bank. Our new board has the perfect mix of investor experience and operator experience, ranging from CEO, COO, VP Sales, VP Marketing and CTO experience in startups as well as multinationals. We look forward to working with the new board as we strive to bring advanced cluster management to system administrators and IT managers around the world.
As many startup entrepreneurs know, it is hard to attract the attention of the well-known Sand Hill Road VCs, so I am particularly proud of the fact that DFJ wanted to lead this B round in Bright Computing and made a very compelling offer. DFJ is well known for its backing of serial entrepreneur Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity) as well as Twitter, Tumblr, Skype, Hotmail, and many other well-known, and less well-known but equally successful, enterprises.
We have enjoyed tremendous growth since we founded the company in 2009. We now have more than 400 customers around the globe, including more than 20 of the fortune 500. The range of customers is also broad, from startups to Fortune 500 giants, from small NGOs to the US Department of Energy, and from hospitals to universities. Looking ahead, we will continue to invest in building our team, expanding our product line, and extending our ability to serve our customers. We are committed to developing the cluster management framework that allows our customers to maximize their returns on cloud and cluster infrastructure.
Bright is in markets as competitive as we’ve ever been, especially in the big data Hadoop and OpenStack private cloud spaces. I believe we will thrive in these markets because we are bringing years of relevant experience to bear in new ways that will accelerate the adoption of these new technologies. But most people today are still struggling to build and maintain their clouds and clusters using a collection of mismatched tools. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we’re ready to roll. Onwards!
