Congratulating Puppet Labs

This morning, Puppet Labs announced a strategic partnership with IT industry leader VMware, with VMware leading a $30 million investment in the company. It’s another big milestone for Puppet, and we couldn’t be more excited for Founder Luke Kanies and his team.

We led Puppet’s Series A back in June 2009, when it was a three-person company called Reductive Labs and was still “headquartered” in Tennessee. At that time, terms like “big data” didn’t exist, and the “cloud” was just beginning to infiltrate the enterprise. As with most of our investments, the team was what drew us in first and foremost. You could see the will, determination and vision inside of Luke. He was truly leading a movement as the data center was going through a tremendous architectural shift. As we stated at the time:

“The strength of Puppet really lies in the rich community of contributors and users that continue to grow at a rapid rate…As we’ve learned through our experiences with companies like Automattic, building a community does NOT take money but rather focus, talent, patience and a commitment to continually delivering outstanding product.”

Puppet has clearly come a long way, becoming a household name in most of the world’s IT departments, with global offices and a team of more than 100 people. The market opportunity is actually even bigger than we thought, and we look forward to supporting Luke and his team on the journey ahead.

Read more about the Puppet/VMware partnership here and here.