Venture Capital News: Blue Box Closes $3.5M in Series A
2012-11-01
SEATTLE, WA, Leading cloud hosting and managed services company, today announced it has completed an initial closing on a $3.5 million venture round led by Voyager Capital.
Blue Box, a leading cloud hosting and managed services company, today announced it has completed an initial closing on a $3.5 million venture round led by Voyager Capital. Founded in 2003, this round represents the company's first equity investment and will be used to accelerate product innovation, secure additional engineering talent, and expand its marketing and sales efforts. With nearly 600 clients including MTV, VH1, Seeking Alpha, Pivotal Tracker, Agawi, and Crowdstar, Blue Box provides a managed, intelligent and highly automated application infrastructure that enables customers to focus their energy on building and improving their Web applications. In addition, the company announced that it has appointed Bill McAleer, Managing Director at Voyager Capital to its Board of Directors.
"Blue Box is a rapidly growing company that is profitable, has doubled revenue year-over-year for the last four years, and has already gained significant momentum in the market," said Bill McAleer, Managing Director at Voyager Capital. "Applications are moving online at a frenetic rate. However, companies are recognizing that managing the stack below the app is not their core competence. Blue Box has built a significant amount of core technology that enables its customers to build better applications. We think this represents a significant market opportunity which is why we chose to lead their first venture investment round."
Blue Box was founded in 2003 as a managed hosting provider. Blue Box has generated explosive growth in its customer base and has expanded its datacenter footprint into multiple geographies in both the Seattle and Washington D.C. areas with plans for an international footprint in the near future. Blue Box's ownership of the physical hardware drives to the core belief in owning the entire customer experience and assists in providing unparalleled 'white-glove' service. As the company acquired additional customers, Blue Box began to codify many of its best practices to automate its platform service. In addition, Blue Box leverages an assortment of open source technologies including OpenStack, EMC Razor and Opscode's Chef alongside Blue Box IP.
"Building applications for the Web comes with its own set of unique challenges. How do you scale your apps economically? How do you ensure security without slowing down performance? How does the cloud play into all of this? Over the course of nine years, we've learned how to bring these efficiencies to customers so they can focus on what's most important -- their applications," says Jesse Proudman, CEO of Blue Box. "This investment represents a new chapter for Blue Box as we productize our service offering and build out our architecture to support our next stage of growth."
About Blue Box
Established in 2003, Blue Box is a leading cloud hosting and managed services company. Nearly 600 companies use Blue Box's managed application hosting for infrastructure solutions. Our clients receive white-glove 24/7 support through our industry-leading technical implementation and management expertise. With ownership and control of the infrastructure, Blue Box delivers comprehensive hosting solutions with game-changing uptime to enterprises and applications of any size. To contact Blue Box, visit www.bluebox.net, email sales@bluebox.net, or call toll-free: 1-800-613-4305.
About Voyager Capital
Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast information technology venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies. Voyager invests in first venture round opportunities in digital media and software, where the firm's domain expertise and "Go-to-Market" resources help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has $370 million under management with offices in Seattle, Washington; Menlo Park, California; and Portland, Oregon. For more information please visit: www.voyagercapital.com/.
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