San Francisco-based software development company Pivotal has landed $253 million in additional funding, at a reported $2.8 billion valuation, bringing Microsoft and Ford on as new investors to join existing backers GE, EMC and VMware in the Series C round.
“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, in a statement.
Pivotal, which originally spun out of EMC and VMware, said in a news release that Microsoft’s decision to invest is “a response to growing enterprise developers’ desire for an even closer relationship between Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure.”
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the company’s platform for developing, deploying and running software and cloud services.
“Our priority is ensuring that Microsoft Azure is the best place to run Java applications using Pivotal Cloud Foundry,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise Division, in a news release announcing the investment. “Today’s announcement is a reflection of this commitment, along with our continued emphasis on choice and flexibility across our cloud platform.”
Ford and Pivotal were already working together, with the companies pointing to the launch of FordPass last week as the first project to emerge from their collaboration.
Pivotal has 2,000 employees and says its first quarter revenue was $83 million, up 56 percent year-over year. In addition to Ford, the company says it works with nearly a third of the Fortune 500, including companies such as GE, Verizon, Home Depot, Comcast, Humana, Lockheed Martin, and Allstate.
Former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz, who was previously Pivotal’s CEO, remains the executive chairman of the Pivotal board.
Note: Reference to valuation has been corrected since original post.
