Fugue closes $41M funding round

Fugue started off the year by posting a big investment round once again.
The Frederick-based cloud infrastructure company raised a $41 million Series D round. NEA, the VC giant with Baltimore roots, led the round. Also jumping in were the Maryland Venture Fund, which is backed by the state and managed by TEDCO, and the Future Fund, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Australia.
Along with the new capital, NEA’s Ron Bernal and Wayne Jackson, CEO of Howard County-based Sonatype and former CEO of Sourcefire, are joining the company’s board.
Fugue came out from under the radar last year, launching its product of the same name over the summer.
The company has now raised $75 million, including last year’s $20 million Series C. During an interview around their launch, CEO Josh Stella spoke of being at the beginning of a big innovation period in IT.
“Cloud is the most profound change to computing in 40 years,” said the former AWS employee. “It’s a really big deal, and we’re really only at the beginning of it.”
That means there are fundamental challenges to tackle. For bigger businesses, Fugue wants to remove the roadblocks to operating at scale in the cloud. The shift from the datacenter to the internet-based cloud requires new tools to address the cloud’s complexity, he said.
Rather than a remote datacenter, Stella looks at the cloud as a big, distributed computer to be programmed. The platform that launched last year is essentially an operating system for the cloud. It looks to simplify operations in the cloud by automating the management of a cloud infrastructure stack for anything with an API. An initial version is available for free on Amazon Web Services. With the new funding, the company is looking to launch an enterprise version, as well as new features. The fresh capital will also back sales and marketing.
The company has more than 50 employees. Along with Frederick, the company also has offices in D.C., Atlanta, New York and Silicon Valley.