05 May 2016, USA :
Pivotal announced a whopping $253Mn funding in a new round led by Ford Motor Co., with additional contributions from Microsoft.
Previous backers EMC, VMware, and General Electric also contributed.
New Series C funding round brings valuation of Pivotal to $2.8 billion.
“Enterprises can get on this journey and compete effectively in this new world,” says Pivotal President and COO Bill Cook.
It’s a big deal for Pivotal, which has seen some exec turnover this past year: Tech industry legend Paul Maritz stepped down as CEO last August, though he’s still on board as Executive Chairman. This is Pivotal’s first investment deal under new CEO Rob Mee.
“As applications and workloads move from on-premise to the public cloud, our investment in Pivotal reinforces the increasing demand for a deeper partnership between Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure to service the world’s largest enterprises and their developers,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division, is quoted as saying in a statement on the Pivotal funding news.
And yet, Microsoft has its own competing PaaS services, as do Red Hat, Apprenda, and other vendors.
San Francisco-based Pivotal has more than 2,000 employees. In the first quarter of 2016, Pivotal generated $83 million in revenue, up 56 percent year over year, the company said in the statement. Customers include BMW, Humana, Lockheed Martin, Philips, and Verizon.
This year, Pivotal has announced acquisitions of CloudCredo, Neo, and Slice of Lime. Last year, Pivotal moved to open source much of its big data tooling.
Ford CIO Marcy Klevorn said, “Microsoft and Ford have an existing relationship, with the Microsoft Azure cloud powering Ford’s own FordPass app. It puts Pivotal, Ford, and Microsoft all on the same page.”
