Chef™ (formerly Opscode), IT automation for speed and awesomeness, today announced it has closed a $32 Million Series D funding round. Scale Venture Partners (ScaleVP) led the round, which included Citi Ventures, Citi's corporate venturing arm, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, DFJ, and Ignition Partners, and also included Amplify Partners.

The new round of capital will be used to further accelerate the development of the company's Chef IT automation platform, expand market penetration, and drive customer success.

Chef also today announced that Rory O'Driscoll, a partner with ScaleVP, has joined the company's Board of Directors. In addition, the company has expanded its executive team (see separate press release) and has changed the company name from Opscode to Chef.

'The new normal of relentless 24x7 digital demand means that enterprises must make IT the primary customer touch-point. The continuous delivery of code is the only way to make this gigantic shift and win the race to market,' says Barry Crist, CEO of Chef. 'Chef is the best IT automation platform for coding stable systems at speed. This new financing will fuel our next stage of growth and enable us to deliver even more innovation to our rapidly growing base of enterprise customers.'

Adds ScaleVP's O'Driscoll: 'Chef's strong revenue and customer growth, vibrant open source community, and disruptive technology point to strong momentum and a huge opportunity ahead. I'm excited to be working with Barry and his team; they have the vision and the capability to deliver.'

New Research Underscores Need For Speed In the Enterprise

A new study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Chef (see separate release) found that speed is the top priority of enterprise IT leaders, but that today's IT is unable to keep pace with customer demand. The report - 'IT Speed: The Crisis and The Savior of the Enterprise' found that while 36 percent of Fortune 1000 IT leaders surveyed highlighted faster delivery of IT services as their top priority, and a full 58 percent placed it in the top three priorities, only 17 percent can deliver fast enough.

Chef automates IT infrastructure and application delivery with code, empowering enterprise businesses to move at high speed in today's customer-propelled economy.

Chef Enterprise Adoption Soars

Chef's Sales grew 250 percent year-over-year for the third quarter. The number of new Chef Software customers grew by 350 percent for the nine-month period ending September 30, 2013, with Fortune 1000 companies accounting for nearly 60 percent of Chef's sales.

'Our business results prove our deliver-fast-or-die mantra is very real, indeed,' says Adam Jacob, Chief Dev Officer at Chef. 'Only Chef empowers businesses with code to achieve the speed necessary for satisfying digitally-enabled customers worldwide. Chef will help build the next 1,000 Amazons - companies capable of using code to re-build and change their businesses hundreds or thousands of times daily in the name of customer demand and service. We're not fooling around.'

About Enterprise Chef

Chef models IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, providing the integrated tool chain and automation platform to achieve the speed necessary to succeed in today's customer-propelled economy. Chef delivers the power and flexibility to move faster in a complex world - from rapid provisioning and deployment of IT resources to the automated delivery of applications and services - at any scale.

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About Chef

We are Chef. We are IT automation for speed and awesomeness. We give you a model for automating IT infrastructure and applications that drive self-reliance across your development and operations teams. We are the Chef Community. We are tens of thousands strong. We are helping your businesses become faster, safer and more flexible, so you win in today's 24x7 digital economy. Join our movement today. www.getchef.com