Puppet Labs just landed $8.5 million in funding from Google, Cisco, and VMWare — and a Portland investor

So much for things slowing down with the holidays. Or Christmas is coming a little early. Or something.

Puppet Labs just announced that they have landed $8.5 million in Series C funding—and it includes money from Google, Cisco, and VMWare.

But there’s some local money investing in Puppet, too.

I’m thrilled to announce that VMware, Google, and Cisco have joined existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners in our $8.5 million Series C financing. Gene Kim, author of VisibleOps and founder of Tripwire, has also invested.

“The participation of these new investors in this latest round reinforces our lead in providing powerful IT automation tools for system administrators, whether deploying applications on-premise or in the cloud,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, in a press release. “Together, we are well-positioned to enable IT organizations to fully capitalize on the tectonic shifts of virtualization and cloud computing in their delivery of business results.”

How will the funding be used?

How will we use these new financial and partner resources? From the enthusiastic reception of our recently released commercial product, Puppet Enterprise 2.0, it’s clear that doubling down on designing powerful IT automation tools that are easy to use – and, going forward, integrated with the our new partners’ products – will result in tremendous benefits for system administrators. In particular, we will invest more in designing products that allows our users to move faster, with more information, and across a wider selection of technologies than ever before, as it’s clear is necessary to take full advantage of the disruptions of virtualization and cloud computing. In addition, our community over the years has consistently provided great feedback and guidance on our technology, and these new financial resources enable us to increase our investment in both community and platform.

According to Mike Rogoway at The Oregonian, this continued funding in town is getting us back near our numbers for the dot com days. Erik Siemers over at the Portland Business Journal also covered the story.

Honestly, I was hoping to do a round-up of posts on this big news. But no one seems to be talking about it in the tech community. And that’s odd. Puppet already had huge customers and name brand investors. And now it’s got even more big names. Which is awesome for them. And awesome for Portland.

Hopefully more folks will pick up on this story as the day progresses.

For more information, see the Puppet blog post on the funding.

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy