Second generation platform as a service DotCloud is announcing its $10 million dollar Series A today, after a recent rockstar-filled seed round which included Ron Conway and Chris Sacca. Investors in the most recent round include Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures.
Along with the financing, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Apple engineering manager Marc Varstaen, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton and Trinity’s Dan Scholnick will be joining the DotCloud board of directors.
DotCloud’s appeal is in its flexibility. Unlike the first generation Heroku and its clones, DotCloud lets developers to build and deploy their applications rapidly by allowing them to customize components and supporting multiple languages and tools.
But co-founder Solomon Hykes tells me that DotCloud is focused less on competing with Heroku clones and more on when developers should use Amazon and when they should use DotCloud. “It’s about being complimentary to infrastructure providers,” Hykes says.
Says co-founder Sebastian Pahl, “With DotCloud, developers get their dream application platform and they no longer need to fill that sys admin role. Instead, developers and their IT teams can choose a stack, push code into our automated system and see their apps deployed with very little work. ”
DotCloud will be using the financing to amp up its marketing and engineering in order to develop a “world class support application right from the start.” “We’re definitely hiring,” Hykes tells me.