New Start-Up Platform9 Got $4.5 Million in Series A Funding …

Platform9 Systems, Inc., a company with a new approach to creating and managing private clouds, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding from Redpoint Ventures.

The company plans to use the money to further accelerate its roadmap and growth.

“We believe the private cloud management market is ripe for disruption. Platform9 is one of the most innovative companies in this space, and customer excitement and engagement has been phenomenal,” said Redpoint Ventures partner Satish Dharmaraj, who has joined the board. “Platform9 is uniquely positioned to seize this opportunity with their all-star founding team and cloud-based delivery model.“

Platform9 was founded in 2013 by early VMware engineers Sirish Raghuram (CEO), Madhura Maskasky (head of product), Roopak Parikh (head of engineering) and Bich Le (chief architect), a team with decades of combined experience building virtualization and systems management products.

They founded Platform9 because they observed that enterprises were struggling to make private clouds operational using their existing virtualized infrastructure.

“We founded Platform9 with the goal of reimagining how private datacenters could be managed. We believe that just like SaaS revolutionized the world of enterprise applications, it can do the same for enterprise datacenters. You can think of us as the Salesforce.com of private cloud management,” said Raghuram. “Platform9 transforms an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes. The organization can then focus on using their existing infrastructure to run applications instead of babysitting the management stack.”

Platform9 advisors include Meraki founder Hans Robertson, former VMware exec Bogomil Balkansky and Caroline McCrory.

The start-up is a private cloud company whose SaaS platform transforms an organization’s existing infrastructure into an agile, self-service private cloud within minutes, offering the simplicity of AWS-like public clouds with complete ownership of all resources and data. The platform is the first 100% cloud managed platform for KVM, Docker and vSphere. Founded in 2013, Platform9 is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA.