Business

Mesosphere Raises $125M, An IPO-Level Haul For Data Center Tech

Morning Report: Let’s explore the latest funding round that likely has given birth to a new unicorn. 

This morning news broke that Mesophere has raised a $125 million Series D from a host of investors. The new cash brings the company’s total funding to date to just under the quarter billion dollar mark.

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TechCrunch’s Ron Miller summarizes the late-stage startup as “a company that created an operating system of sorts for the modern datacenter.” That same publication had this to say when the company previously raised money: Mesosphere is a “container-centric company that aims to help enterprises better utilize their data centers with the help of its Data Center Operating System.”

I hope that that helped.

Here at Crunchbase News, we care a bit more about the financials behind the white papers, so let’s dive.

Valuation And Growth

The company’s new valuation is opaque, but we have some notes to work off of. During its Series C round, the capital event that preceded today’s $125 million infusion, the firm was hunting for a valuation of around $600 million. That was back in 2016, so let’s presume that the company got something close to that number; it was a good time to raise.

Now, a few years later, the company has raised a much larger round. So, after putting its $73.5 million Series C to work, the company is raising bigger money. That smells like things are going fine over at Mesosphere.

(For fun: Mesosphere was worth $181 million at the time of its Series B. Those investors are doing well.)

Adding to valuation guess is the company’s now-known revenue growth. Per the company’s release detailing its Series D: “Since our founding, we’ve nearly tripled revenue year-over-year[.]” So, in the more than two years since its Series C, Mesosphere has dramatically grown its revenue. What we don’t know is if the firm was overvalued during its Series C, giving it more to grow into before its Series D. Regardless, as long as the company’s revenue isn’t screwy, it has grown quite a lot.

This means that we can likely guess that the firm is now worth around $1 billion or more.

That makes the scale of its new capital—greater than 100 percent of what it had raised before—reasonable for 2018.

For more on $100 million rounds, head here.

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iStockPhoto / VOLHA RAMANCHUK

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