DigitalOcean Raises $83M Series B Round Led By Access Industries

DigitalOcean, the fast-growing cloud infrastructure service for developers, today announced that it has raised a $83 million Series B round led by Access Industries, with participation from previous investor Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s $37 million Series A round last year. Access Industries previously invested in the likes of Rubikloud, ironSource, Beats and Cyanogen.

This new round brings the company’s total funding to $173.2 million, including a $50 million debt financing round last December. The company says it now has 500,000 developers on its platform who have spun up a total of over 6 million cloud servers since the service launched.

As DigitalOcean co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky told me, the company had a lot of inbound interest from VCs since the beginning of last year, but things really started to ramp up around the start of 2015. The company still has sufficient capital in the bank from its last rounds and had originally planned to look into more funding later this year, but the team decided to capitalize on this opportunity. According to Uretsky, DigitalOcean has occasionally been profitable already, “but with this rapid rate of growth, you sometimes get a little bit ahead of yourself,” he admitted.

DO_Logo_Vertical_Blue-75e0d68b“We play in this very interesting developer ecosystem that touches a lot of startups. And they talk to a lot of VCs,” Uretsky said. “So DigitalOcean’s name comes up when they talk to VCs and that sends a very strong signal to the VC community.”

Many investors won’t touch capex-intensive infrastructure companies like DigitalOcean (or startups that challenge Amazon), but Uretsky believes that Access Industries is an investor who understands the ecosystem the company is playing in. Access Industries’ Pueo Keffer, who recently joined the firm after a long run at Redpoint Ventures, will take a seat on DigitalOcean’s board.

The company’s plan is to use this new funding to focus on new features for its platform. In its early days, the company was barely able to cope with its growth, so actual product development was kept on the backburner as the team focused on scaling the existing service and its international expansion.

“We now have a great global footprint, but now it’s time to step up and build out our feature set,” Uretsky said. The next major product launch is going to be a cloud storage service, which will likely launch in the first half of 2016. Before that, though, the company plans to launch a number of improvements to the networking component of its platform, including the launch of floating IPs, which will make it easier for developers to build highly available services on the company’s platform.

DigitalOcean was always popular with developers — both because of its focus on simplicity and its competitive pricing model. Now, however, the company wants to be more than just a playground for developers. It wants to be able to offer startups the tools they need to grow on its service and within five to ten years, Uretsky hopes, the next Uber-like emerging enterprise company will be built on its platform.