Mirantis lands $100 million in fresh round of funding led by Intel

It is available in commercial and free versions, and prevents customers from being locked down to a single vendor.

Alongside Intel, Mirantis is planning to refine all of the components that make up OpenStack into a series of stages.

This latest investment round includes Goldman Sachs, which is joining existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures, formerly known as SAP Ventures, and WestSummit Capital.

Intel also is committing additional money to finance future technology development by the Silicon Valley startup. Intel’s investment into Mirantis should help the company optimize its enterprise features and drive more industry adoption. “All the fruits of the labor will be contributed upstream and will benefit all other OpenStack users, not just Mirantis customers”, Ionel told CRN.

Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis, said the company plans to draw on the investment and Intel’s technological expertise to position OpenStack as the enterprise’s preferred way to access cloud.

OpenStack is the open source cloud operating system that was launched in July 2010 to provide an alternative to proprietary public cloud infrastructure vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. As TechCrunch pointed out, many have recently been acquired by larger companies: Cisco snatched Metacloud and Piston, IBM bought Blue Box, and EMC picked up Cloudscaling.

Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) is not new to working with other companies in developing products that spur sales of its win technology. Intel is doing more than offering cash, though.

However, the most likely scenario is that Intel is assisting the cloud-computing and data storage-related software platform technologies from afar.

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.

In 2014, Intel partnered with Cloudera, a major supplier of the open-sourced software Hadoop, which assisted companies to store and analyze huge amounts of data. Mirantis has proved its potential to the world, the reason external investors seem to be so keen to invest in the company.

The Intel investment in Mirantis also shows how old alliances among tech companies are changing into more nebulous combinations of partnership and competition – co-opetition, as it is often called -driven by what appear to be permanent changes to the industry. The chipmaker invested $740 million in the partnership.