We know Mirantis from the hey days of Russian outsourcing industry (they are known, for example, for establishing Cadence R&D center in Russia). As it is with many outsourcing entrepreneurs, Mirantis’ Alex Freedlandhas turned the company around and became an OpenStacks-solutions company (hat tip to EWDN).
Last week Mirantis, announced that it has raised $10 million (7,6 million euro) in the second part of a Series A round from Ericsson Venture Partners, Red Hat, Countrywide Financial and SAP Ventures. The company says that it will use the funding to develop its platform Fuel, a tool for the management and deployment of OpenStack clouds, and for increasing integration with technology and product from the company’s partners. In announcing their new investment, Mirantis also announced an update to Fuel, which will offer an improved interface as a single control plane for OpenStack clusters and will enable automated hardware discovery and network verification. Mirantis, which was founded in 1999 by Alex Freedland and Boris Renski, previously announced in December 2012 that they had raised $10 million in the first part of its Series A round from Intel Capital, Dell Ventures, and West Summit Capital. Prior to obtaining the initial funding in December, the company was funded by sales revenue. Although headquartered in Mountain View like many tech companies, Mirantis maintains Russian offices in Moscow and Saratov and a Ukrainian base in Kharkov.
Back in 2010, the OpenStack project was created to provide for the creation of open-source cloud software for public and private networks. Then, in September 2012, Mirantis became a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation, along with more than 150 other companies. As they note in the information provided, this list of companies includes now-investors Red Hat, Intel, and Dell, so the relationship that they’ve developed seems to go back a ways. The companies says that they have provided expertise in over 30 OpenStack development projects over the last 2 years and customers include NASA, Gap, PayPal, WebEx, and AT&T.
