Today, Grand Rapids, Mich.-based technology firm Blue Medora announced they've received an additional $1.25 million in growth capital from two West Michigan-based angel investment groups: Start Garden and the Grand Angels. The company plans to use the new funding to fuel its continued rapid expansion and go-to-market activities for its unique set of virtualization and cloud monitoring and management plugins that extend the functionality of popular enterprise management systems like Oracle Enterprise Manager and IBM Tivoli.

The investment includes $500,000 from Start Garden, a Grand Rapids startup seed fund started by Rick DeVos as well as $750,000 in funds from the Grand Angels, a regional angel investment group. While Start Garden typically provides $5,000 investments to startups for very early support, DeVos said Blue Medora is the latest in a series of recent investments in more seasoned, second stage companies demonstrating market potential.

"With the Blue Medora investment, we invested aggressively into seasoned entrepreneurs working in a space with huge potential that they know very well," said DeVos.

Blue Medora co-founder and CEO Nathan Owen said the company is well positioned to capitalize on a tremendous opportunity by providing a unique, much-needed virtualization solution to users of popular enterprise management solutions like IBM Tivoli and Oracle EM. He said Blue Medora's current market potential is thanks to a partnership with another Grand Rapids- based IT firm Atomic Object, a longstanding and close relationship with IBM, and his own team's passion for providing what they believe is a game-changing solution to a vast community of enterprise management system users.

"We've been incredibly fortunate to be part of the type of perfect storm of ideas-meet-opportunity that build great solutions for technology users," said Owen. "Early support from visionary organizations like Start Garden, the Grand Angels and Atomic Object means we have been able to leverage our ideas and our longstanding relationships with companies like IBM, Oracle and VMware to create a set of first-in-category, much-needed solutions in this space."

Blue Medora was founded in 2007 as a partnership between Owen and Atomic Object. They spent the first 18 months developing their initial product, which bridged the monitoring and management capabilities of a key IBM product to a number of critical Oracle applications including PeopleSoft and Siebel.

Owen said IBM already licenses a number of virtualization and cloud management products from Blue Medora, which has doubled in size from 11 to 22 employees since 2011 and is expected to employ up to 35 people in the next 18 months. Additionally, he said Blue Medora is gaining critical velocity quickly in the marketplace, including a customer portfolio of over 50 enterprises currently using their solutions, and they beginning to attract the notice of analyst groups like IDC and Gartner. The company's current development strategy includes the introduction of systems management and monitoring solutions meant to extend the virtualization capabilities of Oracle EM through VMware integration.

"Systems management is rapidly evolving. Companies are moving away from single solution systems management and demanding more customization and integration into cloud-based solutions like VMware," said Owen. "Blue Medora has been and will continue to work with companies like Oracle, IBM, and VMware to provide leading edge solutions to meet their customers' changing needs."

Based in Grand Rapids, Mich., Blue Medora has developed a range of validated/certified integration products that extend the monitoring and management capabilities of IBM and Oracle's market-leading systems management platforms to the world's leading cloud, virtualization, ERP, CRM, enterprise directory, and messaging software. For more information, visit www.bluemedora.com .