Platform9, the open-source-as-a-service company making hybrid clouds easy, today announced it has raised $22 million in Series C funding led by Canvas Ventures. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) also participated in the round, as did existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures. The funding round, which brings Platform9's total capital raised to date to $36.5 million, allows the company to scale its pioneering cloud delivery model, which makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain hybrid clouds with popular cloud frameworks, such as Kubernetes, OpenStack and Fission. The new capital enables Platform9 to scale its global salesforce, product and marketing teams, as well as boost engineering investments as it expands its innovation agenda to deliver new capabilities for hybrid clouds.

"Enterprises today are racing to adopt the cloud, but struggle with managing numerous infrastructure silos, ranging from legacy virtualized data centers to pockets of public cloud deployments," said Sirish Raghuram, CEO, Platform9. "With our novel SaaS approach to complex cloud frameworks, we enable infrastructure anywhere to be easily managed using industry-leading open-source frameworks such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. Today, Platform9 is enabling DevOps, reducing costs and accelerating cloud transformation for more than 200 clouds worldwide."

Platform9 emerges as a hybrid cloud leader
The financing round caps a year of tremendous growth for Platform9, in which it has emerged as the leader in hybrid cloud management, ahead of established virtualization and cloud megavendors. A few highlights include:

Customer base growth of 360 percent and revenue growth of 300 percent
Winning marquee enterprise customers across industries, with 60+ enterprise customers including Cadence Design, Autodesk, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Sony Playstation
Net revenue retention of 125 percent, with existing customers increasing their annual subscription licenses
With more than 200 enterprise clouds managed worldwide, Platform9 has emerged as the top enterprise cloud platform in terms of number of clouds managed
Product breakthroughs including the industry's first Kubernetes-as-a-service solution that manages any infrastructure, Fission, the leading open source serverless framework, and Omni, open-source extensions for OpenStack to manage public clouds
Partnerships and joint solution validation with leading enterprise vendors, including NetApp, Nutanix, Juniper, Dell/EMC, HPE and public cloud providers
"Enterprises know they have to move to the cloud sooner or later," said Gary Little, partner at Canvas Ventures. "But getting there is no small feat. Platform9 simplifies the challenge, helping companies migrate to cloud computing more quickly and cost effectively than any other solution. It also helps customers avoid being locked into a single cloud provider. That's something that resonates with chief technology officers across industries."

About Platform9
Platform9 provides open source-as-a-service for enterprises that need faster and easier ways to deploy, manage and maintain hybrid clouds across multiple platforms. Unlike do-it-yourself or legacy solutions, Platform9 delivers best-of-breed cloud infrastructure like OpenStack and Kubernetes as SaaS-managed solutions, enabling speed, scale and savings, all while avoiding being locked into a single vendor ecosystem. Platform9 helps DevOps and IT teams focus on solving core business problems while automating much of the set-up and management process on the back end. It has enabled customers like Cadence Design, Autodesk, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Sony PlayStation to realize a greater than 99 percent success rate with OpenStack projects. Founded in 2013 by a team of early VMware engineers, Platform9 is backed by Redpoint Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Menlo Ventures and HPE, and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit www.platform9.com.

About Canvas Ventures
Canvas is a respected early-stage venture capital firm based in Portola Valley, CA. The partners are known for notable investments in software & services companies. Prior to joining Canvas, the firm's partners led early-stage investments in MuleSoft, Lending Club, Houzz, Evernote, NexTag, Check, Doximity, Elance-oDesk, and more. They are "thesis investors" and currently concentrate on the areas of "new enterprise" solutions, artificial intelligence, fintech, health IT, and marketplaces. The Canvas partnership was formed in August 2013. FutureAdvisor is a prior Canvas investment which was acquired by BlackRock in 2015. Current Canvas portfolio companies include: Eden, Everwise, Casetext, CrowdFlower, Fluxx, Folloze, HealthLoop, Hustle, Luminar, Platform9, Totango, Transfix, Vida Health, Viewics, and Zola. More at www.canvas.vc.