rPath, seeking to put more companies in ‘clouds,’ closes on $10M

Raleigh, N.C. — With all due respect to the Rolling Stones and their “get off of my cloud” lyrics, rPath wants to help more companies get on the “cloud” of virtual computing.

The Raleigh-based firm that two former Red Hat executives launched in 2005 has closed on $10 million in a new round of venture funding. The money will be used to expand rPath’s efforts to expand use of cloud computing.

Cloud computing enables users to access a variety of resources as provided by such companies as Amazon’s “Elastic Computer Cloud.”

rPath is positioned to be a player in that growing market through its virtualization technology and products that help clients build virtual appliances. Software appliances enable Linux applications to be streamlined and run on standard industry hardware and in virtualization environments linking devices, regardless of location or configuration.

Wakefield Group, North Bridge Venture Partners, and General Catalyst led rPath’s new round of funding. All had invested in rPath earlier.

rPath has now raised more than $25 million in capital.

“As the demand for cloud computing continues to explode, rPath is in a unique position to drive adoption as the fastest and most scalable approach for delivering applications to cloud computing environments such as Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), Citrix’s XenServer, and VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure,” said Billy Marshall, rPath’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

rPath noted that a recent report from Merrill Lynch identified cloud computing as a $165 billion market opportunity.

The funding came midway through a year in which rPath said demand for virtualization has helped the company increase its customer base by over 100 percent.