SAN FRANCISCO, Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., a software company developing commercialized OpenStack software for businesses, has raised $4.5 million in funding. The round was led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating. Lars Leckie from Hummer Winblad, and Puneet Agarwal from True Ventures will join Piston's board of directors.

Launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010, OpenStack is the fastest-growing open-source project in the world, with over 1,100 contributors and 82 participating companies, including Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks and Dell.

"OpenStack has seen unprecedented market traction in the last year. There is a growing demand for a cost-effective, standards-based cloud solution suitable for enterprise and we think Piston's team is best suited to deliver it," said Lars Leckie, of Hummer Winblad. "We are really excited about the technology they are building."

Piston's co-founders came from the technical teams at NASA and Rackspace (NYSE:RAX), and helped to create the OpenStack project in 2010. Piston's CEO, Joshua McKenty, was the Cloud Architect of NASA's Nebula Cloud infrastructure, the precursor of OpenStack's cloud computing component, and holds an appointed seat on OpenStack's Policy Board. Piston's CTO, Christopher MacGown, was a Technical Lead at SliceHost, acquired by Rackspace in 2008. In addition, the team has recruited some of the best talent from the OpenStack community, including core contributors from NASA and other participating organizations.

"This is great news for OpenStack. We're excited to see investment in the community and a healthy ecosystem of both established and emerging companies engaged in the project," said Jim Curry, GM, Rackspace Cloud Builders. "There has been tremendous interest from large enterprises to deploy OpenStack and opportunity for companies like Piston to deliver secure, private cloud solutions based on the open source cloud operating system."

Piston Cloud technology is currently in limited beta, with a public release expected in Q4 2011.

About Piston Cloud Computing
Piston delivers enterprise-class software built on OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. The company is based in San Francisco.