ServiceMesh raises $15M from Ignition to give enterprises more control over the cloud

Enterprise cloud platform provider ServiceMesh has raised $15 million in its first-ever round of funding to help businesses better manage their cloud services, the company announced Wednesday morning.

“Our platform makes it possible for companies to completely govern their cloud ecosystems,” ServiceMesh CEO Eric Pulier told VentureBeat. “We’re going to take this new capital and scale the company globally.”

ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform is subscription-based software that gives companies a set of APIs to improve efficiency and cut costs when it comes to implementing cloud services. The Agility Platform (as seen in the image above) is made up of five distinct products: Planner, Designer, CenterPoint, Manager and Access. The company says it has thus far helped financial, health care and retail customers from the Global 2000 better manage their “mission critical” systems.

The company considers big-name players like BMC, IBM and HP as its competition, but only just. “We welcome companies like IBM and BMC to the space, but they are behind us,” Pulier said.

ServiceMesh has been entirely self-funded up to this point, but it accepted the $15 million round of funding from Ignition Partners because it wants to aggressively grow the company.

Frank Artale, a partner at Ignition will join ServiceMesh’s board of directors. Artale has been guiding investments toward major cloud companies, and just last week Ignition led Cloudera’s new $40 million funding round. Ignition also led AppFog’s $8 million round in August.

“To successfully deploy [cloud] services in the enterprise, organizations must be able to bring their cloud, SaaS, and business services together under a unified SLA [service-level agreement], governance and compliance framework,” Artale said, in a statement. “And because of the do-it-yourself approach that enterprise IT and business users take toward consuming cloud resources, organizations need a transparent mechanism for departmental chargebacks and usage analysis. The ServcieMesh platform is unique in its ability to deliver these capabilities.”

Santa Monica, Calif.-based ServiceMesh was founded in mid-2007 and currently has more than 90 employees — quite a feat for being entirely self-funded.

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