Pivotal Secures £175m In Funding From Ford, Microsoft And EMC

Pivotal is set to announce a $253 million (£175m) Series C funding round today, with investors including Microsoft and Ford – as well as previous backers EMC and VMware, according to reports.

The latest round of funding gives the company an estimated value of $2.8 billion (£1.9bn), sources told VentureBeat.

Big Data

Ford has already been working with Pivotal on a number of projects. The car manufacturer is using Pivotal’s Big Data Suite to build a Smart Mobility connected vehicle platform.

Ford’s FordPass, which allows drivers to monitor their cars from a mobile app, is also built on Pivotal Software’s technology.

As for Microsoft, Pivotal-backing offers a way to expand Microsoft Azure’s sphere of influence when it comes to moving workloads onto public cloud.

The company, which has more than 2,000 employees worldwide, recently announced first-quarter 2016 revenue of $83 million (£57m), up 56 percent year over year.

“Here at Pivotal we are partnering with customers to create a world where the largest and most admired companies can build and run software like Google, Uber or any venture-backed startup. This investment will accelerate our global reach to bring our unique software development methodology and modern cloud platform and analytics tools to every forward-thinking CEO,” said Rob Mee, Pivotal CEO.

Spin-off

In February, Cisco and the VMware/EMC spin-out Pivotal Software partnered to sell each other’s cloud products as Cisco looks to boost its cloud prowess.

The deal will will see the two companies sell Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry-based cloud platform, and Metapod, Cisco’s OpenStack data centre offering.

Last December, Pivotal scooped up London startup CloudCredo, a Cloud Foundry services provider, reportedly full to the brim with experts in the platform, going some way to enhance Pivotal’s offering

Pivotal was launched three years ago by EMC and VMware, and has to date rasied $358 million (£247m) in funding.

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