Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » OpenView Venture Partners

Instructure Raises $8 Million Series B Round of Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 06:29:11 +0000

Instructure is a company that has developed an open source learning management system. Instructure has raised $8 million in Series B funding from OpenView Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s venture capital company Tomorrow Ventures, and Tim Draper. Instructure raised a total of $9.2 million. Instructure’s software called Canvas includes assessment tools, discussions, web chat, multiple assignment submission types, drag-and-drop file uploads, HTML5 video, and speech-to-text conversion.

Instructure has Google Docs and Facebook integration and is installed on 30 educational institutions. The company is led by Mozy founder Josh Coates. Mozy was sold to EMC for $76 million in 2007. Below is a commercial for the company:

[TechCrunch]

Cloud Automation Company Skytap Raises $10 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 11:50:42 +0000

Skytap is a cloud automation solutions company that has raised $10 million in a Series C round of funding. OpenView Venture Partners led the round of funding with participation from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Washington Research Foundation.

Skytap plans on using the funding to scale their sales and marketing teams. Scott Maxwell, the senior managing director of OpenView will be joining the board of directors at Skytap. Below is the full press release:

Skytap Secures $10 Million to Accelerate Business Growth for Cloud Automation
OpenView Venture Partners Leads Round With Participation From Current Investors — Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation

SEATTLE, WA–(Marketwire – January 3, 2011) – Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced an oversubscribed $10 million Series C round of funding led by OpenView Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The investment will be used to scale sales and marketing, and accelerate innovation of the company’s flagship cloud automation platform. Scott Maxwell, senior managing director of OpenView Venture Partners, will join Skytap’s board of directors.

“After evaluating the emerging cloud market it became very clear that Skytap is a driving force in cloud automation and a breakout success in every sense of the word,” said Scott Maxwell at OpenView Venture Partners. “The company’s market leading cloud automation solutions are some of the most complete and well-received offerings on the market. We’re eager to contribute to Skytap’s future growth and lead this round of funding.”

Since its launch in 2006, Skytap has broadened its portfolio of cloud solutions and built a comprehensive cloud automation platform. Based on the breadth of its offerings and rapid customer adoption, Skytap has experienced both usage growth and year over year revenue growth of more than 300 percent.

“Skytap had a tremendously successful year and we are enthusiastic about what’s to come as we refuel for aggressive execution on all fronts,” said Scott Roza, CEO of Skytap. “Hundreds of customers have chosen Skytap for their cloud automation needs and these same customers frequently double or triple their users and usage after just a few months. This funding will enable us to expand our current customer relationships, further build out our sales team, and develop new solutions that help customers accelerate their transformation to the cloud.”

“Since our first investment in Skytap, we’ve been extremely impressed with the company’s ability to routinely exceed its business and revenue goals,” said Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. “Over the last year, Skytap has also delivered against key product milestones that position the company well for its next stage of growth. We’re proud to invest in Skytap’s future and support the company as it continues to build its reputation as one of the most innovative technology companies.”

Along with this funding and the company’s rapidly growing customer roster, Skytap has received numerous accolades based on the superiority of its cloud automation technology. Recent awards include: SD Times 100, Red Herring 100, AlwaysOn OnDemand Top 100, SearchCloudComputing Top 10 Cloud Computing Startups and the 2010 Best of VMworld finalist. Skytap has built one of the strongest partner networks in the cloud industry enabling Fortune 1000 enterprise customers and government and defense agencies to accelerate their transition to the cloud. Earlier this year, Skytap was selected by Google as a cloud partner for the Google Apps Marketplace launch, and global IT leader CSC selected Skytap to power its prestigious CloudLab offering.

About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can gain visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs by 70% or more. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap to their data centers and create virtual private clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including application development, testing, virtual training, application migration and sales demonstration projects. To buy or learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, OpenView helps portfolio companies to quickly scale Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions with best practices. The firm was founded in 2006 and has total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView recently launched its new operational value-add content site at www.openviewlabs.com. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis. To learn more, please visit www.openviewpartners.com.

Up and Coming Visual Search Engine, Quintura Receives Substantial Funding From Early Skype Investors

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 20:38:50 +0000

Quintura, an up and coming search engine is now backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that is proved to be visionary investors by providing initial investments into Skype. Quintura’s See & Findâ„¢ search technology utilizes tag clouds in addition to search results. The algorithms surrounding Quintura has been developed over the course of several years through Quintura’s U.S. and Russia-based engineers.

“Our team approached the problem of finding Internet-based information and entertainment from the standpoint of the user” stated Yakov Sadchikov, the co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We strived to build something that made it as easy as possible for the user to find exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible. We also wanted to make the user experience very visual and more enjoyable, so we built in visual navigation technologies that are more appealing to users.”

Yesterday the investment announcement was made. The total investment is undisclosed. ABRT Venture Fund and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston were also involved in this round of investment into Quintura.

“We have found the team of Mangrove being a visionary investor and very intelligent partner in developing our consumer driven Internet business.” said Yakov Sadchikov, co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We plan using the venture capital to take the Web by storm and reach millions of web users globally when launching the Quintura visual find engines for various user communities. We are also starting an affiliate program for most popular web-sites and blogs such as Digg, Netscape, and others where they can easily make their current tag clouds very interactive.”

Although the Quintura search results are created by Yahoo! XML, the user interface, the tag cloud feature, and the Save It! and Share It! features are unheard of anywhere else. By surrounding the search keywords with other relevant keywords from the Meta tags in the search results, users can optimize their search engine experience.

Here is a sample screenshot of a search on “Bill Gates”:

Notice the accuracy of the tag cloud? Words such as “chairman,” “microsoft,” “melinda,” and “foundation” have been other suggested searches in the cloud. Investment in such a company proves that search engine technology is becoming a booming market once again and the next Google could be right in front of us.

Quintura, Inc. is a U.S. corporation with offices setup in Alexandria, Virginia. Quintura’s software development operations are based in a region of Moscow in Russia. Quintura is planning on offering blog and web publishers an affiliate program to display Quintura clouds on their websites in the near future. The Qunitura team has a blog and has also announced that they have an image visual search as well at http://www.quintura.ru/. On August 2006, Business 2.0 featured Quintura as one of the world’s hottest startups.