Devops player Puppet Labs adds $40M with high hopes for growth

Faithful users of Puppet Labs‘ software can stop holding their breath now.

The company, whose tech simplifies the operation of tons of data center infrastructure, has extended its life by way of a $40 million funding investment announced today.

Puppet will continue development on and keep offering support for its software, which targets people who do devops — handling a bit of software development and a bit of operations.

In that business, Puppet goes up against Chef, SaltStack, and Ansible. It’s a hot business as developers increasingly become responsible for frequently deploying code into production.

But Puppet has a competitive lead at the moment, at least if you ask Bill Koefoed, the company’s chief financial officer.

“You could probably fit all of our competitors together, and they’re probably not half our size,” Koefoed told VentureBeat.

And Puppet wants to maintain that lead. The company wants to become better skilled in managing networking and storage resources, not just computing gear, Koefoed said.

Partnerships with vendors could help Puppet sign up more businesses, too. Puppet works with Cisco and VMware, and integrations stemming from those partnerships have led to lots of requests for premium support.

Use of Puppet’s open-source software package also leads to new business. Puppet boasts that more than 18,000 companies use the Puppet software.

“I’d rather have them using open-source than something else because we’ll get them later,” said Koefoed, who was previously head of investor relations at Microsoft.

With the new money, Puppet intends to make it easier for companies to start using the commercially supported Puppet Enterprise service. Puppet will make announcements related to that goal in the next few months, Nathan Rawlins, Puppet’s vice president of product marketing, wrote in an emailed statement to VentureBeat.

International expansion could also derive from the new money, Koefoed said.

Puppet claims more than 500 customers, including Bank of America, Cisco, eBay, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Puppet, based in Portland, Ore., started in 2005 and today employs around 300 people. The company’s workforce should expand beyond the 400-person mark by year’s end, Koefoed said.

No new investors joined today’s round; only existing investors participated: Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Venture Capital Group, True Ventures, and VMware.

To date, Puppet has raised $86 million, including last year’s $30 million investment from VMware.

A public bid is not imminent, although this “should hopefully be our last round,” Koefoed said.