Ravello Secures $26 Million in Total Funding …

Ravello Systems, Inc. has closed its second round of funding bringing the total amount of funds raised to $26 million.

It is now backed by Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Founded in 2011 by Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider, the founding team behind the standard KVM hypervisor, Ravello is positioned to change the game in the hybrid cloud market by delivering the Cloud Application Hypervisor.

"Enterprises cannot use the public cloud the way that they would like to which is to be able to rent capacity on demand and simply spill-over bursty workloads," said Tamir, CEO, Ravello. "That’s not possible today because the public cloud environment is completely different from the enterprises’ internal data center. The industry needs a solution to normalize the application environment across the private and public cloud, so that enterprises can truly begin using the public cloud."

"We have developed a Cloud Application Hypervisor that encapsulates multi-VM applications along with their entire environment including the VMs, networking, storage etc. so that enterprises can run any application in any cloud without making any changes," said Schnaider, president and chairman of the board, Ravello. "Unlike other solutions in the market that adopt a management only approach, Ravello’s Cloud Application Hypervisor normalizes the application environment so that it can run on the private or public cloud."

Ravello’s executive team brings expertise in virtualization, cloud, networking and storage technologies, and is the same team behind Qumranet, the company that developed the KVM hypervisor (acquired by Red Hat in 2008), now the standard virtualization technology in Linux.

They are:

• Rami Tamir, co-founder and CEO: He was VP of engineering at Red Hat. He joined Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet where he was the co-founder and president. Previously he held senior key management positions at Cisco which he joined through the acquisition of Pentacom where he was co-founder and head of software.
• Benny Schnaider, co-founder, president and chairman of the board: He was VP of business development for Red Hat. He joined Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet where he was co-founder and CEO. Prior to that, he founded Pentacom and served as its CEO. He also co-founded P-Cube, (acquired by Cisco in 2004). As a board member, Schnaider played a key role in other companies including B-Hive (acquired by VMware in 2008) and Traffix (acquired by F5 in 2012).
• Navin R. Thadani, SVP Products: He joins from Red Hat, where he ran the virtualization (KVM/ RHEV) business line. He joined Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet in 2008 which he led as the VP of products. Previously, Thadani held several senior management positions at Cisco).

"The rest of the market is focused on solving the enterprise public cloud adoption problem with ‘management only’ solutions – which is like managing complexity with more complexity," said Shmil Levy, partner, Sequoia Capital. "Ravello is the first company to tackle the problem head-on from an infrastructure perspective. It’s very much like what VMware did back in the early 2000s to the enterprise data center."

"The leadership team behind Ravello has a track record of developing innovative technologies in the virtualization infrastructure space and backing it up with solid execution," said Adam Fisher, partner, Bessemer Venture Partners. "Their previous virtualization initiative, KVM has been a tremendous success in the market with record breaking virtualization performance and scalability. This time around, HVX is another ground-breaking technology and if any team can deliver, it’s these guys."

"NVP partners with entrepreneurs that have a strong vision and big ideas. We backed Benny and Rami previously when they created KVM at Qumranet, and are happy to back them again at Ravello," said Vab Goel, partner, Norwest Venture Partners. "Ravello’s technology has broad applications in terms of hybrid cloud computing and true application mobility. An end-to-end solution in this space will go a long way in getting real enterprises to adopt the public cloud."

Ravello also announced the public beta of its service that’s designed to enable developers to harness the unlimited resources of the public cloud to develop and test applications.