Pivotal provides technology and a programming methodology designed to change how enterprises develop products. Its key offerings include Pivotal Cloud Foundry, an open-source Platform-as-a-Service, and a Big Data Suite for processing and analyzing large datasets. The company was launched three years ago by EMC and VMware with a 10% investment from GE and operates as an independent unit despite investor ties to Dell-EMC. Pivotal serves major customers, including seven of the top ten U.S. banks, three of the top five automakers (including Ford), and five of the top ten telecommunications companies. It currently has about 2,000 employees and says it plans to IPO eventually but is using new capital to wait for a more favorable market. The company intends to use the funding to expand product development, hire engineers, and move into foreign markets. Pivotal is a spin-out of EMC and VMware positioning itself as an enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS). The company's platform combines VMware technologies (Cloud Foundry PaaS, SpringSource, Gemstone, Cetas) with EMC assets (Greenplum, Pivotal Labs) into a single virtual organization of about 1,400 employees. Pivotal's platform is intended to let customers launch applications and offer data analytics, and GE will work with Pivotal using the Global Software Center in San Ramon, California to develop a software platform to deliver as a service to industrial customers. GE framed its investment as aligned with its Industrial Internet strategy and to support joint R&D. Analysts cited in the article say Pivotal currently lacks key integration, a high-productivity cloud-native development model, and social/mobile capabilities tied to the 'nexus of forces.' The initiative is described as ambitious but still missing pieces around integration and an OpEx-focused, AWS-like service model.

Total raised

$358M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

May 2016