Blue Box--a Seattle-based provider of on-demand private cloud as a service (PCaaS) solutions--has closed a $10 million Series B financing.

The round was led by a strategic investor and included participation from prior investors including Voyager Capital and Founders Collective, as well as the Blue Box executive team.

This round follows a $4.3 million Series A closed in December of 2012 and led by Voyager Capital. In May of this year, the company announced general availability of its private cloud as a service offering, Blue Box Cloud. Since that release, the company has demonstrated market validation through customer adoption, positive reviews from industry analysts and key additions to the company's technology and commercial teams.

This financing will allow the company to build on its successes over the past year and fuel continued technical innovation, significant growth of the engineering team and continued expansion of the company's partnership, sales, and marketing programs. Specifically, the company will increase development of its proprietary management suite, Box Panel, with additional capabilities to support features valuable to customers and partners. The company will increase investment in both technical and channel partnerships while expanding sales and marketing teams and programs.

Eric Mandl of Guggenheim Securities advised Blue Box on the transaction.

Supporting Quotes

'We wanted to scale our SaaS platform by taking advantage of the cloud while staying compliant at the highest levels. To accomplish this, we needed to combine the performance and data sovereignty benefits of private cloud on bare metal while preserving the agility of public cloud. We evaluated several options, and Blue Box Cloud was the only one that delivered what we needed. We get custom VM sizing, a library of curated VM images, and no issues with noisy neighbors or unpredictable performance.'

--Sunil Karkera, co-founder and CTO, Registria

'This Series B financing provides the capital necessary to deliver on the next phase of our strategic plan to bring private cloud as a service to more customers and partners. The marketplace is telling us that the Blue Box Cloud delivery model, technology, and reliable OpenStack-powered infrastructure are precisely the combination they want to be able to consume private cloud as a service.'

--Matthew Schiltz, CEO, Blue Box

'Over the last year, we've proven true our thesis that customers want to build and focus on their apps, not their infrastructure. Blue Box Cloud makes that possible and provides customers many benefits of public cloud with all the benefits or private cloud. This capitalization empowers us to further develop our proprietary management and scale-out technology, adding features and growing our global footprint.'

-Jesse Proudman, founder and CTO, Blue Box

'Blue Box has staked out a leading position in an emerging and important market segment. The OpenStack movement is witnessing strong growth and consolidation. Customers who want the benefits of agile infrastructure without the responsibilities associated with design, deployment or operations are turning to Private Cloud as a Service. In effect, Blue Box is targeting customers that want all the benefits of private cloud on the same terms they've come to expect from public cloud.'

--Caroline McCrory, senior director, Gigaom Research

'Enterprises are looking for choices in how they deploy applications, and we continue to see interest in hosted private clouds as well as with OpenStack in general. Blue Box, with its private cloud as a service model, brings expertise in OpenStack, infrastructure design and cloud operations, and these are capabilities strategic investors in this space seek.'

--Al Sadowski, research director, Service Providers, 451 Research

About Blue Box

Blue Box delivers Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS) to customers worldwide. The company's technology platform leverages decades of operational expertise in cloud and distributed systems to deliver Blue Box Cloud--a managed, hosted private cloud on dedicated hardware, powered by OpenStack and available and scalable on demand. Blue Box Cloud delivers core benefits of both public and private clouds in one offering. Blue Box meets the control, performance, and security needs of customers in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, financial services, digital media, gaming, technology and retail. Learn more about Seattle-based Blue Box at bluebox.net or find Blue Box on Twitter at @bluebox.