OpenStack company Mirantis takes on $100M round led by Intel Capital

Mirantis, a company that sells a distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software, announced today a $100 million funding round. Intel Capital led the round, and now Mirantis will be collaborating with Intel to increase enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

OpenStack, which began in 2010, has been adopted by some of the largest companies, like PayPal and Walmart, but it hasn’t become a mainstay among large enterprises in the same way proprietary virtualization software like VMware’s vSphere has, and it’s not quite as widely used as public cloud infrastructure. Intel’s investment in Mirantis shows that the chip maker believes OpenStack still has potential for growth.

The cloud-native stack, including OpenStack, can provide companies with “a true alternative to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware,” Mirantis cofounder and president Alex Freedland told VentureBeat in an interview.

Intel’s major investment in an OpenStack company might look like an innovative move, but really Mirantis is Intel’s only choice. Pretty much all the other venture-backed OpenStack startups have been acquired. Cisco recently bought Piston, and IBM recently bought Blue Box. Earlier, Cisco acquired Metacloud, and EMC acquired Cloudscaling. All that activity has left the fate of Mirantis in question, but now it’s clear that investors believe in the prospects of the company.

Last year Intel made a big investment in a Hadoop distribution company, Cloudera. Now Intel’s venture capital arm is backing a company in the open-source cloud software market.

Today’s news comes a few days after Mirantis disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had raised $75 million, but the company wouldn’t immediately discuss it.

To date, Mirantis has raised at least $220 million, including the $100 million round announced last October.

In addition to Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs, August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures, and WestSummit Capital also participated.

Mirantis started in 1999 and is based in Mountain View, Calif. Around 750 people work for the company, and the headcount should reach 900 a year from now, Freedland said.

The company has more than 200 customers, including AT&T, Gap, Samsung, Symantec, Verizon, and Wells Fargo.

“The battle that we’re looking to fight is humongously large,” Freedland said.