Start-Up DigitalOcean in SSD Powered Cloud Raised $37.2 Million

DigitalOcean, Inc. has closed a $37.2 million series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors IA Ventures and CrunchFund.

The firm was started in the summer of 2011 with a mission: to make developers lives easier. It thought that the other players in the space had made IaaS too complicated. It focused on user experience and simplicity.

With three engineers the company built the first version of its product and with help from the Hacker News community growth exploded when it announced its SSD powered cloud.

In the past 15 months and with only a handful of engineers, the firm has been able to hit some milestones. It launched over 1,000,000 virtual servers, processed 18,000,000 events, opened new datacenter regions in San Francisco, CA, and Singapore, for over 100,000 customers.

Andreessen Horowitz
DigitalOcean stated: “We are tackling a huge market with a big problem and when it came time to raise our next round we wanted to find the right partner that would join us in our uphill battle. We met with Peter Levine of Andreessen Horowitz and he immediately impressed us not only with his technical knowledge but also with his views on open-source and how to build successful companies around that focus.”

Engineering at Scale
It added: “We chose to build our own cloud automation platform from the ground up. Instead of adopting an existing project we decided to build it ourselves. It was the only way we saw to create a unique experience that customers would love. We are building services today that will make developers lives easier tomorrow. With thousands of servers spread across the entire world, scale is at the heart of DigitalOcean’s engineering challenges. With this funding, aside from purchasing a boat-load of servers and networking gear, we are growing our engineering team. Great engineers reside in every city across the world and we’re hiring remotely.”

DigitalOcean Growth