Chef, the leader in automation for DevOps, today announced it has closed a $40 million Series E funding round. The round was led by DFJ Growth and included Millennium Technology Value Partners, as well as all existing investors: Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, DFJ, Ignition Partners, and ScaleVP. Hewlett Packard Ventures also joined the round with a strategic investment. This new round will allow Chef to extend its leadership in the DevOps market by expanding Chef's operations globally and accelerating product development amidst surging customer demand.
Chef's business is growing exponentially with annual recurring revenue growth accelerating as the company scales. More than half of the Fortune 50 use Chef and 80 percent of Chef's revenue comes from enterprise businesses.
Chef is a pioneer in DevOps, the cultural and professional movement underpinning the digital transformation of every enterprise today. Chef is recognized as the standard automation platform for the DevOps workflow, with companies including Facebook, GE, Target, Bloomberg, Nordstrom, Gap, IBM, Yahoo, and Intuit, among more than 750 customers using Chef to accelerate software delivery and reduce operational risk. AWS, HP, and Microsoft, which today made Chef available on its Azure Marketplace (see separate release), have all joined Chef's go-to-market efforts, solidifying Chef as the premier automation platform for DevOps.
'This is an inflection point for Chef as a company. Our innovation is becoming the primary bridge between traditional IT and New IT in the enterprise,' said Barry Crist, CEO, Chef. 'Today we enter a new era as the automation control plane for digital-first organizations everywhere, and this new capital will help us take DevOps mainstream.'
'We are long term advocates of Chef since DFJ first funded the company's Series A round in 2009,' said Sam Fort, Principal, DFJ Growth. 'Chef is at the center of a fundamental shift in IT as enterprises race to change how they build and deploy software to become high velocity organizations. Chef has become the leading platform for enabling this transition, and we are thrilled to lead this investment to help accelerate Chef's growth in the market.'
This latest funding round comes after the recent introduction of Chef Delivery, an extension of the Chef platform that enables full-stack continuous delivery of infrastructure, runtime environments -- including containers -- and applications. With Chef Delivery, the company has captured DevOps success patterns of its most innovative customers and distilled them into a product that brings advanced software development practices to all developers and system administrators who manage changes in enterprise IT environments.
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About Chef
Founded in 2008, Chef Software is changing the way companies build and deliver software to delight customers. Chef is the leader in automation for DevOps, empowering customers to build and operate high velocity organizations. Built on a strong open source foundation, we have distilled the proven patterns and practices for fast and scalable software development into our leading IT automation platform. Chef automates the continuous and unified delivery of applications and infrastructure, enabling enterprises worldwide to deliver software much faster with minimal risk. With hundreds of commercial customers and tens of thousands of open source community members, we are leading one of the strongest technology movements today. Our company is based in Seattle, WA, and financed by DFJ Growth, DFJ Ventures, Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Ignition, and ScaleVP. Learn more about Chef at www.chef.io.
About DFJ
DFJ is a venture capital firm that partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs who set out to change the world. Since 1985, DFJ's core funds have raised $4 billion, which have been deployed in more than 300 portfolio investments, including Baidu, Box, Foursquare, Skype, SolarCity, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Twitter, Tumblr, and Yammer. DFJ works with companies at seed, early, and growth stages, with the goal of creating iconic and lasting businesses. DFJ invests in emerging markets including consumer, enterprise, and disruptive technologies. Learn more at www.dfj.com.