Solinea Raises $4M Series A To Help Business Deploy OpenStack Clouds

Deploying an OpenStack cloud is still anything but easy. Solinea helps enterprises design and deploy their private clouds, both as a consulting firm and as a technology provider. The company today announced that it has raised a $4 million Series A round led by Translink Capital, with participation from its angel investors.

TransLink Capital has strong ties to Asia and a background in enterprise technology, which, according to Solinea CEO Francesco Paola, makes this a perfect fit for his company.

Paola and his co-founder and CTO Ken Pepple — who has a long history in the OpenStack world — started the company a few years ago and mostly bootstrapped it. Paola told me he saw a gap in the market as companies started to look at private clouds but were faced with the challenges of scaling their operations.

Solinea started as a services organizations, but Paola told me that the team always believed that it would have to invest in a product platform as well. This product platform is Goldstone — a tools for visualizing, monitoring and managing OpenStack clouds. As Paola admitted, his experience has taught him that it’s very hard to scale a services business without having a product platform as well.The team open sourced the Goldstone tool earlier this year and plans to launch a new product based on it in Q1 2016.

This new product is one of the areas Solinea plans to invest its new funding in. The other is to accelerate the company’s growth and to invest in expanding its business in the APAC countries (with a special focus on Japan). Paola believes that there aren’t all that many competitors for Solinea in this market and that there is a lot of interest in OpenStack in many of these countries, even though there aren’t all that many businesses there that have moved to deploying OpenStack in production yet.

Interestingly, Europe isn’t really a focus for Solinea yet and Paola noted that it’s on the company’s roadmap but that he also has to be diligent about how the company deploys its resources.

With today’s funding announcement, Solinea also disclosed that it’s working with market infrastructure provider Deutsche Börse to develop a hybrid cloud platform.

“The greatest success we see in cloud adoption is among companies where the business and IT leadership understand that cloud adoption is driven by more than just the technology solution,” said Paola. “Deutsche Börse, along with our clients in North America and APAC, see this as a strategic imperative to achieve the business benefits of agility and efficiency, and we’re excited to be part of the team that’s implementing the Deutsche Börse hybrid cloud.”