Puppet Raises $42 Million For DevOps Automation

Morning Report: Puppet, a DevOps automation platform, has raised a $42 million Series F led by Cisco.

IT automation software company Puppet has raised $42 million in a late-stage round led by Cisco. Other participants included EDBI, along with previous investors Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, and VMWare.

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The Portland, Oregon-based company was founded in 2005 and aims to use its software to allow companies to better manage their operating infrastructure and automate application deployments. With Puppet, companies can design apps and infrastructure, and share, test and deploy platform changes while increasing infrastructure and data visualization.

Prior to this capital infusion, the company raised $22 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank in January 2016. With this new round, its known aggregate venture funds raised has reached $127.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Though the company has not released information regarding its current valuation, TechCrunch speculates that it has reached “significantly more than $700 million, and may well be approaching the $1 billion-mark.”

With that funding, the company has expanded in the U.S. It is also adding five new offices in Seattle, Sydney, Timisoara, Singapore, and Tokyo, where it says a partnership with Singapore-based EDBI will serve its goals in Asia.

Separately, Puppet made two acquisitions in the past year, including its purchase of data visualization service Reflect earlier this month, according to its press release.

The company boasts that it has brought more than 40,000 companies on its platform and has introduced five new products in the last year. According to Crunchbase, Puppet’s main competitors include Chef, an operations and infrastructure automation platform which has raised $105 million for its own efforts from investors like DFJ, Scale Venture Partners, and Battery Ventures. The flow of capital from VCs and corporate investors in the space points to the interest in building smart, automated technologies that can better serve the growing magnitude of operations that tech companies manage and deploy.

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Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias