Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money: UPDATE 1

Startups have always attracted pride of place on this website, and with many of them being created with astounding regularity and getting financing, this article is just the first of many updates that are sure to follow. You can read some other consolidated news articles on startups here:

1. Acquisitions of Cloud Computing Startups Speed Up

2. Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money

Startups are no longer the domain of the young college graduate with ideas, especially in a field like cloud computing that builds on existing competencies in information technology. Consequently, executives with years of experience have started to join hands and start companies in this space; because of their backgrounds, venture capital is also easier to come by.

In addition to the ones in the aforementioned articles, here you can read about two of them that have garnered a lot of attention in recent times:

1. What Bromium’s Funding Means for Cloud Security

2. The Hottest New Cloud Computing Startup: Nebula

Now, a senior executive has come out of retirement to enter the cloud computing space, and raised big money as well. Sandra Kurtzig, founder of Ask Group that was later sold to Computer Associates, has come out of retirement to start Kenandy Inc. (www.kenandy.com/), so named after her sons Ken and Andy. The company intends to provide a cloud-based solution that aids collaborative manufacturing for globally distributed operations and supply chain networks. Kenandy recently announced Series A funding of $10.5 million from top VC Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who were accompanied by premier Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati and cloud computing giant Salesforce.com.

Having previously built Ask Group into a $450 million-company dealing in manufacturing management software, Kurtzig has the domain experience to make a success out of her venture. And with friends like Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO and someone whom she credited as influencing her decision, Kenandy may well turn out to be a future star in the industry.

The second company on our list is New York-based Apprenda (apprenda.com/), a company that, in its own words, provides a PaaS software stack that can be deployed “in traditional datacenters, on top of virtualization, and in the cloud.” Its applications are based on Microsoft’s .NET framework and have been successfully installed more than 2000 times.

Recently, tech VC Ignition Partners led a $10 million round of funding in Apprenda. Frank Artale, managing director at the VC and advisor to Apprenda for the last five years, will join the Board.

“Apprenda has a growing customer base and a scalable business model to help grow into an extremely profitable business as they are solving a key need for enterprises. This is an exciting time for Apprenda as they are rapidly expanding and have an incredibly talented management team and group of engineers. I look forward to working closely with the team as a member of the board of directors,” he said.

By Sourya Biswas

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sourya

Sourya Biswas is a former risk analyst who has worked with several financial organizations of international repute, besides being a freelance journalist with several articles published online. After 6 years of work, he has decided to pursue further studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he has completed his MBA. He holds a Bachelors in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Information Technology. He is also a member of high-IQ organizations Mensa and Triple Nine Society and has been a prolific writer to CloudTweaks over the years... www.cloudtweaks.com/author/sourya/

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