Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar (Puppet Photo)

Portland, Ore.-based cloud automation company Puppet today announced a $40 million funding round from BlackRock.

Founded 15 years ago, Puppet helps customers develop cloud-based infrastructure that automates various parts of a multi-cloud environment.

The company is led by Yvonne Wassenaar, who took over last year after stints at VMware, New Relic, and Airware. Wassenaar, a finalist for CEO of the Year at the GeekWire Awards, told GeekWire in November that she was eager to expand Puppet’s customer base to bigger companies, moving beyond “super users” of their tools.

She also wants to shift from talking about solutions for solving specific use cases, to putting their products into a business context. Wassenaar wants to Puppet to be a leader in a “container-based world.”

“Puppet’s technology runs some of the world’s most critical businesses in the most demanding environments, from financial services to government agencies,” said Yvonne Wassenaar said in a statement. “This new capital will allow us to accelerate our go-to-market efforts and further fuel our innovation investments — from extending the power of Puppet Enterprise in the areas of continuous automation, compliance and patching to our newly-launched event-driven automation solution Relay, built to extend Puppet’s expertise into cloud-native and API-driven environments.”

Puppet this year added former Cloud Foundry Foundation Executive Director Abby Kearns as chief technology officer, and former VMware exec Erik Frieberg as chief marketing officer.

The new capital is a debt round, TechCrunch reported. Puppet has raised $150 million from investors over the years.

“Puppet is a leader in infrastructure automation across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Covid-19 has pulled forward demand for the Company’s technology, which has become more critical than ever,” BlackRock Director John Doyle said in a statement.

BlackRock also today led a $125 million round for Seattle startup Qumulo, another cloud company.

Other Seattle-area unicorn enterprise tech companies including Auth0 and Outreach are also seeing increased demand as of late and have raised more venture capital to fuel growth, even amid the economic crisis.

Despite the pandemic, venture capitalists are pouring money into Pacific Northwest tech companies at unprecedented levels, significantly outpacing the number of deals and dollars invested in the first half of 2018 and 2019, according to a recent GeekWire analysis.

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