Ravello Systems Secures $26 Million in Funding

Led by well-known industry experts, company delivering first Cloud Application Hypervisor secures funding from leading venture capital firms - Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ravello Systems today announced that it has closed its second round of funding bringing the total amount of funds raised to $26 million. Ravello is now backed by Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Founded in 2011 by Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider, the founding team behind the now standard KVM hypervisor, Ravello is positioned to change the game in the hybrid cloud market by delivering the industry’s first Cloud Application Hypervisor.

“Their previous virtualization initiative, KVM has been a tremendous success in the market with record breaking virtualization performance and scalability. This time around, HVX is another ground-breaking technology and if any team can deliver, it’s these guys.”

“Enterprises cannot use the public cloud the way that they would like to which is to be able to rent capacity on demand and simply spill-over bursty workloads,” said Tamir, CEO, Ravello Systems. “That’s not possible today because the public cloud environment is completely different from the enterprises’ internal data center. The industry needs a solution to normalize the application environment across the private and public cloud, so that enterprises can truly begin using the public cloud.”

“We have developed a Cloud Application Hypervisor that encapsulates multi-VM applications along with their entire environment including the VMs, networking, storage etc. so that enterprises can run any application in any cloud without making any changes,” said Schnaider, president and Chairman of the Board, Ravello Systems. “Unlike other solutions in the market that adopt a management only approach, Ravello’s Cloud Application Hypervisor normalizes the application environment so that it can run on the private or public cloud.”

Ravello’s executive team brings deep expertise in virtualization, cloud, networking and storage technologies, and is the same team behind Qumranet, the company that developed the KVM hypervisor (acquired by Red Hat in 2008), now the standard virtualization technology in Linux. They are:

• Rami Tamir (Co-Founder, CEO) - Prior to founding Ravello, Tamir was VP of engineering at Red Hat. He joined Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet where he was the co-founder and president. Previously Tamir held senior key management positions at Cisco which he joined through the acquisition of Pentacom where he was co-founder and head of software.
• Benny Schnaider (Co-Founder, President and Chairman of the Board) - Prior to founding Ravello, Schnaider was VP of business development for Red Hat. He joined Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet where he was co-founder and CEO. Prior to Qumranet, Schnaider founded Pentacom and served as its CEO. He also co-founded P-Cube, (acquired by Cisco in 2004). As a board member, Schnaider played a key role in other companies including B-Hive (acquired by VMware in 2008) and Traffix (acquired by F5 in 2012).
• Navin R. Thadani (SVP, Products) - Thadani joins Ravello from Red Hat, where he ran the virtualization (KVM/ RHEV) business line. He joined Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet in 2008 which he led as the VP of products. Previously, Thadani held several senior management positions at Cisco Systems.

“The rest of the market is focused on solving the enterprise public cloud adoption problem with ‘management only’ solutions - which is like managing complexity with more complexity,” said Shmil Levy, partner, Sequoia Capital. “Ravello Systems is the first company to tackle the problem head-on from an infrastructure perspective. It’s very much like what VMware did back in the early 2000s to the enterprise data center.”

“The leadership team behind Ravello has a track record of developing innovative technologies in the virtualization infrastructure space and backing it up with solid execution,” said Adam Fisher, partner, Bessemer Venture Partners. “Their previous virtualization initiative, KVM has been a tremendous success in the market with record breaking virtualization performance and scalability. This time around, HVX is another ground-breaking technology and if any team can deliver, it’s these guys.”

“NVP partners with entrepreneurs that have a strong vision and big ideas. We backed Benny and Rami previously when they created KVM at Qumranet, and are happy to back them again at Ravello,” said Vab Goel, partner, Norwest Venture Partners. “Ravello's technology has broad applications in terms of hybrid cloud computing and true application mobility. An end-to-end solution in this space will go a long way in getting real enterprises to adopt the public cloud.”

Ravello Systems also announced the public beta of its service that’s designed to enable developers to harness the unlimited resources of the public cloud to develop and test applications.

Supporting Resources

Follow Ravello Systems on the web at www.ravellosystems.com or:

· Twitter

· LinkedIn

· Product and technology overview

· YouTube Video channel

About Ravello Systems:

Founded in 2011, Ravello Systems is the industry’s first Cloud Application Hypervisor provider. With Ravello, enterprises can encapsulate their multi-VM applications and run them anywhere – on-premise or in any cloud – without making any changes whatsoever, and thereby implement a true hybrid cloud. Ravello is offered via an easy to use Software-as-a-Service and enables developers, devops and IT to use the unlimited resources of the public cloud to develop and test their applications. Ravello Systems is backed by top tier VCs including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. For more information, visit www.ravellosystems.com.