Nimbula raises $15M to expand cloud service

Nimbula, a provider of cloud-computing services, raised an additional $15 million in venture capital funding in a second round led by Accel Partners on Monday. It plans to use the money to promote market adoption of its on-demand computing service.

Accel Partners snagged a spot on the company’s board of directors, which will be filled by the Accel partner Ping Li, a cloud-computing specialist who has also backed Cloudera and BitTorrent, among others.

The company bills itself as a provider of a more private and customizable version of online retailer Amazon.com’s on-demand service, which charges users hourly rates to rent computing resources via the Internet. Amazon.com’s service, called the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, was also developed by Nimbula cofounders Chris Pinkham and Willem van Bijon.

Nimbula’s launch was formally unveiled at Structure, a cloud-computing conference held in San Francisco, in June after it raised $5.75 million from Sequoia Capital. Sequoia also participated in Nimbula’s second round.

The cloud service provider joins several others that have also secured venture capital funding recently, including Eucalyptus and Makara.

[Photo: mendhak]