Ravello raises $26M to virtualize web development in prettier skies

What do a town on the Amalfi Coast, a Nashville, Tenn. rock band, and cloud computing have in common? The name Ravello.

Ravello Systems has raised $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners to launch its Cloud Application Hypervisor.

Ravello bridges the gap between the private datacenter and the public cloud. The technology helps developers overcome their “internal resource constraints” by replicating their existing applications in a public cloud environment. From there, they can collaborate on projects, create blueprints, make changes, and QA test more efficiently.

“Enterprises cannot use the public cloud the way that they would like to which is to be able to rent capacity on demand and simply spill-over bursty workloads,” said CEO Rami Tamir in a statement. “That’s not possible today because the public cloud environment is completely different from the enterprises’ internal data center. The industry needs a solution to normalize the application environment across the private and public cloud, so that enterprises can truly begin using the public cloud.”

Tamir and his cofounder Benny Schnaider were on the Qumranet team, an early developer of virtualization technology known as the KVM hypervisor. Open source provider Red Hat acquired Qumranet in 2008. The duo’s extensive experience in this field is attractive to top tier investors like Sequoia, who invested in Ravello’s first round in 2011.

Now with $35 million in capital under its belt, Ravello is announcing the public beta of its service. The company’s headquarters are in Palo Alto, which is significantly less scenic than the Amalfi Coast.

[Apologies to our copy editor Jason Wilson who has a strict no-rhetorical-questions-in-ledes policy.]