CloudPhysics Raises $10 Million in Funding After $2.5 Million Last Year …

Based in Mountain View, CA, CloudPhysics, Inc., who provides intelligent operations management for virtualized workloads, has closed $10 million in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Previous investors the Mayfield Fund, Mark Leslie, Peter Wagner, Carl Waldspurger, Nigel Stokes, Matt Ocko and VMware co-founders also participated in this round.

CloudPhysics plans to use the funding to continue to fuel its growth and innovation.

CloudPhysics was founded in 2011 with the mission to deliver insights to IT teams for actively managing the dynamics of their infrastructures. The company’s cloud-based approach enables it to derive collective intelligence from the 80+ billion samples of operations data it receives daily from its global user base.

"Big data applied in a highly personalized manner has delivered huge, disruptive benefits in every industry – except IT," said Mike Abbott, general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "CloudPhysics is the first to apply it to IT, and they’re well positioned to disrupt this market. We are impressed with their leadership team, game-changing SaaS offering and the community they have built since coming out of stealth mode late last year."

Abbott joins CloudPhysics co-founders John Blumenthal, CEO, and Irfan Ahmad, CTO, and Robin Vasan, MD at Mayfield Fund, on the board.

"The progress CloudPhysics has made over the last 18 months is phenomenal," said Robin Vasan, MD, Mayfield Fund. "CloudPhysics’ leadership team is exceptional, and they have done an excellent job growing the team and developing their intelligent operations management SaaS."

"Managing virtualized IT means managing an ever-changing, dynamic set of conditions," said Blumenthal. "Today’s static solutions can’t keep pace and a new approach is called for – leveraging collective intelligence drawn from industry-wide operations big data and delivering solutions rapidly via SaaS as users encounter new operational problems. This infusion of capital will accelerate our aggressive growth plans as we continue to hire the industry’s best engineering talent and expand our global IT operational data service."

Profile of co-founders:

John Blumenthal, CEO:
He is an industry veteran with more than 18 years of technology experience. He spent nearly seven years at VMware as a director responsible for the product management of the ESX storage stack. He came to VMware from Veritas Software where he worked in a variety of senior roles, including product management, sales, and engineering. Prior to Veritas, he served as VP and GM of product development at @stake, where he worked with a group of security researchers to generate IP and take key products to market. Currently, he also acts an an advisor to several early-stage storage companies.

He received his B.A. from Columbia University. John and his family are active in the Jewish community in San Francisco, CA. He loves to play with his kids when not doing CloudPhysics, especially outdoor adventures involving climbing and surfing. One special project he’s devoted to is the development of data science curriculum for his children’s school, Big Data for Kids. And then there’s a 16-foot boulder ‘problem’ in the desert of West Texas he wants to climb, but he says that will have to wait, for now.

 Irfan Ahmad, CTO
He spent nine years at VMware, where he was R&D lead and co-inventor for products, including Storage DRS and Storage I/O Control. He worked on interdisciplinary endeavors in memory, storage, CPU, and distributed resource management, and developed a special interest in research at the intersection of systems. He also spent several years in performance analysis and optimization, both in systems software and OS kernels. Before VMware, he worked on a software microprocessor at Transmeta. His peer-reviewed research has been featured at ACM SOCC (best paper), USENIX ATC, USENIX FAST, and IEEE IISWC. He was honored to have chaired HotStorage and VMware’s R&D Innovation Conference (RADIO). He is an inventor on seven issued patents and another 20 pending across memory management, page replacement, quality of service management, I/O scheduling and caching.

He earned his pink tie from the University of Waterloo. He and his wife Mateen enjoy spending time with their kids in outdoor activities, building cool things together, visiting museums and taking driving trips in Northern California.

 Jim Kleckner, VP operations
He is a serial entrepreneur with a record of building successful technology companies. Ask him what he loves, and he’ll say it’s solving the ‘hard’ problems and collaborating with bright, talented people. He believes that social entrepreneurship can harness the power of technology for social good. It’s why he is on the board of Benetech, a technology non-profit serving humanity and also serves on the board of RAF Technology. Before founding CloudPhysics, he was EVP at Currenex, the first electronic venue for foreign exchange currency trading and later sold to State Street Bank for more than $563 million. Prior to that, he served as CTO at CATS Software for more than seven years. In the mid-1980s, he was a founder of Cadence Design Systems, managing simulation and test areas.

He holds patents in methods of anti-spam marketing and in digital signatures for settlement of financial transaction workflows. He earned his B.S. from Caltech and Ph.D. in EECS from University of California at Berkeley under Richard Newton. Married with three children, he believes "every youth should have a drop of the wilderness in them – it builds confidence." He has backpacked in the Himalayas multiple times, gone wilderness canoeing in Alaska and northern Canada, as well as snow camping and skiing. Group wilderness expeditions with his family are his passion, and "a whole lot of fun."

 Xiaojun Liu, chief scientist
He is a seasoned performance engineer with a career spanning Google, Salesforce.com and Sun Microsystems. He developed stress tests of the OS kernel powering Google’s production server farm, and worked on performance modeling of server processors at Sun. His expertise includes performance modeling, simulation, testing and root cause analysis at many levels of the system stack, from microprocessor architecture to OS kernels to multi-tier web applications.

He holds M.Eng. and B.Eng. degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing and a Ph.D. in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley. He admits that his biggest challenge may just be living up to his young son Michael’s take on what a founder really does – "Founder means ‘Daddy’ finds everything."