DigitalOcean Expanding at the Speed of the Cloud to Tune of $37.2M
More money than they expected—and from Andreessen-Horowitz. Not a bad situation for any startup.
DigitalOcean’s founders are on a cloud, indeed.
The New York City-based cloud hosting startup just announced the $37.2 million Series A funding round, and says today it is adding 1,000 new users per day. To put that in context, the company reported 1,000 users overall in 2012.
And the stats keep on coming—the startup says it has launched over 225,000 cloud servers for entrepreneurs and independent developers and has more than 5,000 servers operating globally in San Francisco, New York City, Amsterdam and most recently, Singapore.
Ben Uretsky, CEO, says the 55-employee company is looking to add to its engineering power in a big way with its new funding.
“We want to attract the best engineering talent that is available across the globe,” Uretsky told FOXBusiness.com. “We want to develop aggressive product roadmaps in the cloud with the proprietary software we are developing in-house. And we want to expand our data centers in terms of new regions, so we can add to our offering and keep up with our customer demand.”
The demand they are most seeing is from app developers, with Uretsky says is a win-win.
“We are in an app economy,” he says. “We are all carrying around a Smartphone which has enabled a new set of businesses to enable niche applications and services. There are billions of phones worldwide with Internet access, so many can take advantage of our service.”
The service DigitalOcean prides itself on is unfussy, Uretsky points out, a selling point for its users.
“Our simplicity is what differentiates us,” he says. “We own the experience, and it is the most simple cloud provider to use in the world.”
DigitalOcean is also a graduate of the TechStars startup accelerator, which Uretsky says taught the team the importance of streamlining the process from development to reality. This includes cutting out mentors and advisers who are not helping to advance the product.
“Having mentors who have been there and done that turns out to be very useful when the right situation arises,” he says. “Get your trusted people and know when to revert to them for a specific issue. But don’t have too many people, because you can get mentor whiplash.”
And while DigitalOcean has heavy-hitting competition in its space including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Rackspace (NYSE:RAX), it doesn’t plan to abandon its current focus in favor of bigger-name clients, Uretsky says.
“We aren’t trying to steal the next slice of the Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) account,” he says. “There are 18 million developers worldwide, and those are the individuals we target our focus on. We offer a much better infrastructure for the developers. It’s important that where you [as a brand] place your value is important.”