Cisco, Google Ventures, VMware Put $8.5M In Data Center Automation Startup Puppet Labs

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
puppet-labs

Puppet Labs, a data center automation company, has raised $8.5 million in Series C financing from new investors Cisco, Google Ventures, and VMware. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners also participated in the round. This brings Puppet Labs’ total funding to $16 million.



Puppet Labs provides systems management and datacenter automation software for the enterprise and the cloud. Puppet Labs’ flagship product, Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management framework that provides system administrators with an easy to use platform for transparent and flexible systems management.

Earlier this year, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open source roots and launched Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet. Basically, Puppet makes the provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure easier for system administrators.  

The company currently has 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University.  The startup also offers integrations with VMware, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, RightScale, and Zenoss.

Puppet Labs recently acquired the Mcollective, a framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems.


Company: Puppet Labs
Website: puppetlabs.com
Launch Date: 2005
Funding: $45.5M

Puppet Labs develops IT automation software. The company’s flagship products, Puppet and Puppet Enterprise, are designed to allow companies to automate configuration management and infrastructure, cut costs and help organizations better handle infrastructure management at scale.

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