Developer-focused cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean received $37.2 million in its most recent funding round, VentureBeat reported.
DigitalOcean Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Mitch Wainer told VentureBeat in an interview that the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and participated in by previous backers IA Ventures and CrunchFund. The New York-based startup has raised $40.4 million so far, which included last year's $3.2 million round. DigitalOcean was founded in 2011, the report said.
One of the rapidly-growing public clouds today, DigitalOcean provides cloud infrastructure to run websites. After the funding, the company plans to add new services, more features in its application programming interface and maintain its increasing infrastructure footprint. More specifically, the company could add object storage-something it does not yet currently have- to its platform with the help of the proceeds of the recent round. Wainer said that they are also looking to putting a managed database-as-a-service together with analytics and monitoring services. The company is also looking into releasing the API under open source. Wainer said, "We're going to be involving the open-source world to help make a better cloud for everybody else."
Despite the fact that DigitalOcean does not have the same scale and lacks the basic functionality of that of Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft providing infrastructure-as-a-service or IaaS, it is still growing and widely-talked about by developers on message boards, the report said.
While industry observers consider DigitalOcean as just a low-cost virtual provider, Wainer disagrees. Rather, he said that what they offer is a "simple IaaS solution." Even as they continue to add more to their portfolio of services and lure developers from big businesses, the company intends to stay simple, the report said.
Large firms like Nike and TaskRabbit have already put up microsites on DigitalOcean. However, Wainer said their clients are comprised mostly of individual developers with the platform being used by 180,000 of them, the report said.
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