Mesosphere hauls in $125 M Series D investment

Published May 7, 2018

Mesosphere, a company that created an operating system of sorts for the modern datacenter, announced today that it has raised $125 million for their Series D round. Today’s investment brings total funding since it formed in 2013 to almost $250 million.

The round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates and Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT). New investors ZWC Ventures, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Disruptive Technology Advisers (DTA) also participated along with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Two Sigma Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The funding comes at a time when the company has tripled its revenue and wants to take that momentum and expand more into international markets. They currently have 300 employees, 125 customers and are on a $50 million revenue run rate, according to information supplied by Mesosphere .

CEO Florian Leibert says his company decided to take on this money at this point because it sees a market opportunity and needed the funds to expand. “With this latest round, we’ll be able to ramp up R&D and hone our product roadmap toward repeatable, proven solutions around data engineering and data science,” Leibert told TechCrunch.

He wants to take those products to more international markets including Europe, China and the Middle East, while increasing their channel presence, especially with international and regional systems integrators, who can help pave the way into these markets.

Mesosphere’s core technology called DC/OS, provides a way to manage datacenter resources, whether private or in the public cloud, much more efficiently than traditional tools by treating the entire datacenter as a single pool of resources, Tobias Knaup, Mesosphere CTO explained. This allows an operations team to see multiple locations, zones and regions from a single interface, he said.

Mesosphere has taken on a mix of traditional venture capitalists, international funding authorities and strategic corporate backers, but the presence of T Rowe Price and the size of the round could be a signal that the company intends to go public at some point. Leibert wasn’t willing to give anything away, however.

“We are focused on growth and building a self-sustaining company. We certainly haven’t ruled out a public event in the future, but I can’t speak to any specific plans at this time.” In other words, the standard CEO answer to such a question.

The company’s last round was in March 2016 for $73.5 million.