Mesosphere, a Silicon Valley cloud computing startup, announced today that it has raised a $ 73.5 million Series C funding round. The funding was led by existing strategic investor Hewlett Packard Enterprise with significant participation from Microsoft, a new strategic investor. Other participants included A Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Triangle Peak Partners.

Last year, there were reports that Microsoft tried to buy Mesosphere for $ 150 million, but that the deal eventually fell through. Despite that, the two companies remained friendly and partnered together on the Microsoft Azure Container Service, which helps to accelerate the software development cycle for engineers.

The company will use its new cash to invest in its engineering, seeking to fully automate its data center operating system (DCOS), which helps enterprise clients manage data from their data centers in the cloud. This round of funding brings Mesosphere’s total cash raised to nearly $ 126 million.

“Software is eating the world and enterprises of all sizes are paying attention to a new class of applications that run at datacenter-scale,” said Florian Leibert, CEO and co-founder of Mesosphere in a statement. “Whether you make toothbrushes or jet engines, you need an agile IT infrastructure that can run modern container applications and integrate analytics and big data technologies, but which can also support developers using continuous innovation cycles. DCOS is the first platform that takes the roadblocks out of the way so developers and operators can thrive in this new world of containers and distributed systems.”

“Mesosphere is at the center of three of the biggest tech trends today — cloud, containerization, and microservices,” said Scott Guthrie, executive VP of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise division in a statement. “Mesosphere’s [Data Center Operating System] DCOS is preferred by our enterprise customers given the maturity of the container orchestration solution, and that’s why we chose it as a key component for bringing containers to our enterprise-grade Microsoft Azure cloud platform.”

Currently, Mesosphere has more than three dozen customers in addition to Microsoft and HP, including eBay, Yelp, Verizon, and others. In addition, companies like Netflix, Apple, Twitter, and Airbnb all use Mesosphere’s free software Mesos in their database management.

Microsoft and HP, longtime partners in the PC business, would each be a logical acquirer for Mesosphere in the future, so it might seem strange for the two to be working together amicably. However, the two companies also announced a partnership in December 2015 to work on hybrid cloud environments together.

Right now, Mesosphere employs 125 according to its website and is actively hiring for another 20 positions.

GeekWire

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