Blue Medora Secures $8.6 Million in Series B Funding, Total at $14.5 Million

Based in Grand Rapids, MI and founded in 2007, Blue Medora Inc., in software for enterprise cloud and data center management, announced the close of an $8.6 million Series B round led by St. Louis-based Lewis & Clark Ventures Capital LLC.

Blue Medora’s existing investors VMware, Inc., eLab Ventures, Start Garden and Grand Angels also supported the round, bringing Blue Medora’s total capital raised since its inception to $14.5 million.

The new funding round exemplifies a growing shift of VC funding in technology companies outside of Silicon Valley.
 
Blue Medora creates software that offers a single view of applications, databases and infrastructure to quickly resolve IT issues, increase uptime and optimize performance for business applications. Known for developing extensions for virtualized and application management platforms such as Oracle, IBM, VMware vRealize and New Relic, last month Blue Medora launched SelectStar, its first SaaS-based solution that unifies databases and cloud infrastructure monitoring. These Blue Medora IT operational analytics (ITOA) solutions provide IT managers, devops and database architects with complete visibility to the performance of their IT stack.
 
“Blue Medora is partnering with customers to advance adoption of multi-cloud, multi-database and dev/ops environments that make IT-as-a-service an economic reality,” said Nathan Owen, co-founder and CEO, Blue Medora. “We are excited to work with a bold and innovative team of strategic partners to help us expand our global reach and enable any enterprise to see everything about their IT operations from anywhere.“
 
“We believe Blue Medora is providing deep, game-changing insights that weren’t being addressed in the rapidly growing IT operational analytics market,” said Brian Hopcraft, MD, Lewis & Clark Ventures. “An amazing amount of software innovation is happening at Blue Medora and throughout the Midwest, and we’re confident this partnership is going to accelerate Blue Medora’s ability to deliver the next breed of IT analytics solutions.“
 
“Blue Medora is leading the charge for enterprise IT organizations to extend the real-time performance and capacity management capabilities of VMware vRealize cloud systems management platform to help customers avoid downtime and improve service delivery,” said Ajay Singh, senior VP and GM, cloud management business unit, VMware. “Our strategic investment and collaboration with Blue Medora will help fast-track the migration to software-defined data centers, enabling a single view of the IT stack across private, hybrid and public clouds, physical environments, applications and databases.”
 
Analytics for the Entire IT Stack
The new investments will scale the engineering, sales, marketing and support organizations to continue to meet the demands of enterprises IT departments requiring better insight and intelligence about their infrastructure.

This funding follows company milestones, including:

• Marquee customer adoption – Enterprise customers, across all verticals, including the world’s most popular brands and many of the Fortune 500 are adopting Blue Medora.
• Channel growth – In August, VMware began making the Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite available to its 75,000 channel partners.
• Global presence – Blue Medora has expanded in EMEA and APJ and plans to hire in-region leadership.
• Technology partnerships – Blue Medora jointly certified solutions with established and emerging technology leaders such as VMware, New Relic, Amazon, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, IBM, Mongo, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle and SAP.
   

John Abbott, 451 Research co-founder and analyst, said: “As a market sector, IT monitoring is seeing a lot of innovation. Using a cloud-native SaaS delivery model, Blue Medora’s substantial data analytics engine provides new levels of visibility into the database tier that multiple tools can utilize. There is growing demand from customers for a unified view of the data tier, providing context between the database and the cloud/virtualization layer and helping them move more workloads into the cloud.”
 
Ken Brower, director of information systems, Cherry Health, said: “Instead of database engineers, SAN managers and server and hardware admins looking at their prospective management software windows, Blue Medora combined all three with an easy-to-use solution. Now all teams can see into each other’s environments and more quickly solve the issue at hand.“
 
Deni Connor, SSG-NOW founding analyst, said: “Database and IT administrators face major challenges maintaining uptime and performance for a heterogeneous IT stack. With more IT teams being asked to do more to support the business with fewer resources, having instant access to data about their operations is a significant advantage. The additional investment in Blue Medora is strong validation for the momentum they’re seeing in virtualized and cloud data centers and will carry over to the growing database monitoring market.“
 
Dale Foster, president, Promark Technology, said: “Our customers’ journey to the cloud starts with choosing the right applications and architecting the right environment around them. This business outcome-focused approach depends on both organizational and technological change, so it’s vital to partner with software leaders like Blue Medora to help IT teams become more successful and productive. This is the value Blue Medora brings to businesses around the world and we’re excited about this next phase in its growth.“