Puppet is a Portland, Oregon–based infrastructure automation company that builds tools to help organizations automate and manage infrastructure. The company announced a $40 million debt round from BlackRock Investments. The financing is structured as a loan to be repaid, and BlackRock holds a board observer seat. CEO Yvonne Wassenaar, who joined about 18 months ago, has been rebuilding the executive team, adding CMO Erik Frieberg, CRO Paul Heywood and CTO Abby Kearns. Puppet says it views the debt as the first step in a longer-term relationship with BlackRock and is positioning the company for a potential IPO. The company also notes the pandemic has increased demand for automation solutions. Puppet previously raised almost $150 million in prior financings, including a $42 million Series F in 2018 and $22 million in debt financing in 2016. Puppet builds a DevOps automation and management platform that covers applications, cloud services, containerized services and networking devices. The company sells both open source and commercial products and says more than 40,000 companies use its software, including over 75% of the Fortune 100. Puppet has expanded internationally, made acquisitions (including Reflect this month), and established an APAC regional presence in Singapore. CEO Sanjay Mirchandani says the company is focused on expanding its product portfolio to help customers discover, deliver and operate software across cloud and containerized environments. Financially, Puppet has raised $150 million to date and recently closed a $42 million venture round. The company’s rapid customer growth and expansion are presented in the article as contributing to a materially higher valuation than its last disclosed post-money valuation in 2014. Puppet Labs is a Portland, Ore.-based DevOps company. The company secured a $22 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank as a precautionary measure rather than to fund growth. CEO Luke Kanies said Puppet still has half of its last equity round in the bank and expects to be cash-flow positive soon. Puppet appointed former Genentech CFO Lou Lavigne to its board, where he will chair the audit committee as the company prepares for a future IPO. The company is expanding its Portland waterfront headquarters with a lease to add 37,500 square feet to its current 75,000-square-foot office, with the new lease taking effect in 2018. Leadership described the credit line as a cushion for risk mitigation in case of economic uncertainty. Puppet Labs provides a software platform that enables system administrators to gain operational agility, efficiency and insight to proactively manage dynamic infrastructure. The platform supports scaling from tens of servers to thousands, both on-premises and in the cloud. Led by founder and CEO Luke Kanies, more than 18,000 companies use Puppet, including Bank of America, Cisco, Citrix, eBay, NYSE, PayPal, salesforce.com and WebEx. The company currently employs more than 300 people and has added Mukesh Sharma as vice president of sales, EMEA. Puppet Labs raised $40M in this round and has raised $86M in total since June 2009. It intends to use the funds to invest in people, technology advancements and global expansion. Puppet Labs provides systems management and datacenter automation software, including the open-source Puppet configuration management framework and the commercial Puppet Enterprise. Puppet Enterprise simplifies provisioning, configuring, and managing virtualized and cloud infrastructure for system administrators, and the firm acquired MCollective for server orchestration. Customers named in the article include Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University. The company has seen 3.5 million downloads of its software in the past year, signaling strong adoption. Puppet Labs plans to use new funding for product development as well as sales and marketing and is positioning its software to bring SaaS into the data center. It is pursuing strategic integrations with virtualization vendors, notably VMware, to enable automation across heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments.

Total raised

$188M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Debt Financing

Latest activity

Jul 2020