Powder in the keg

Back in February of this year, we closed our Series A round of financing. We haven't announced it until now - we've been too focused on building our product, our team and making our customers successful. Now that enough people are asking we wanted to communicate more broadly about the investment, our backers and how we're putting those funds to use to execute on our vision.

We raised $10 Million in our Series A financing round, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz joined our Board of Directors. Including our seed round of funding, we've raised a total of $11 Million to fuel our growth.

We're fortunate to be working with Ben and the entire Andreessen Horowitz team. Beyond their impressive experience building and starting transformational companies, the firm has several key differentiating features going for it.

Strategic vision: You want sound strategic thinking from your investors. What better way for a firm to demonstrate their strategic thinking than how they act? If you look at the strategy around Andreessen Horowitz's approach to building a next-generation VC firm, it is clearly well thought out. They have a vision of how to help entrepreneurs and are quickly putting the pieces in place to deliver on that vision.

Tactical support in working with entrepreneurs: We've seen this first hand in working with them over the past two years. They provide much more than just capital, with a dedicated recruiting team to support us, responsive and pointed customer introductions, and strategic PR and AR support.

With this investment round, we've also added Mike Maples, Jr. and Ann Miura-ko from Floodgate (formerly Maples Investments) and Ron Conway from SV Angel. Mike and Ann bring insight about high velocity, low touch sales and marketing and more generally a great perspective on building a company. Ron brings an unparalleled and powerful network in the enterprise technology space, which Ben summarized so eloquently.

Several of our seed investors also participated in the round. They include Maynard Webb (CEO, LiveOps), Professor Ed Roberts (MIT), Dharmesh Shah (CTO & Founder, HubSpot), Stephen Marcus (Venture Partner, New Atlantic Ventures), Tom Berson (Anagram Laboratories) and Avid Larizadeh (Co-Founder, Boticca and formerly of Accel Partners).

I tell the team that raising money is like putting powder in the keg -- very powerful if properly directed, but it certainly doesn't come close to guaranteeing a positive outcome. With this investment round, we're fortunate to have added so much experience and expertise that will help us execute on our vision.

This investment also allows us to seriously ramp up our sales and marketing efforts. We're also rapidly growing the engineering team to build more features that our customers need to be successful.

The most important thing is talent, so we are hiring! Come help us build critical infrastructure to power the future of Cloud Computing. Come help us sell it and market it and make our customers successful. It's a unique opportunity so come help us put the powder to work!