Heroku raises $10M for Rails apps in the cloud

Heroku, a company that helps developers deploy Web applications built using Ruby on Rails, has raised $10 million in its second round of institutional funding.

The San Francisco startup compares itself to the cloud platforms of the tech giants, like Windows Azure from Microsoft, and Google App Engine. It aims to remove the headache from running an app on Web-based cloud infrastructure like Amazon’s — once a developer builds their app, they can launch it on Heroku, which then adjusts things like computing capacity and storage as needed.

Heroku says it has now deployed more than 60,000 applications. Last fall, it started integrating with other services, so that for example a company could launch their application on Heroku and then monitor it using services from another Rails startup, New Relic.

The round was led by Ignition Partners, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital. Heroku was incubated by Y Combinator and has now raised $15 million.